SECTION SECOND.
That the Last Judgment takes place in the Spiritual world—shown from the nature of the Resurrection.
The opposite destinies of the spirit and the material body—Opinions of learned men-Extract from Melvill's Sermon, entitled "The General Resurrection and Judgment"—Passage from "The New Jernsalem and its Heavenly Doctrine"—"The reappearance of departed Saints—Objections explained—Resurrection of the material body absurd and unreasonable—contrary to our natural anticipations.
That the last judgment takes place in the spiritual world is evident, from the fact that the spirits of all the dead are in that world, and must forever remain there. The spirit is connected with this natural world through the medium of its material covering. That covering consists simply of an aggregation of particles of matter, which are held together in a human form and filled with life by the spirits power and energy. So long as the material body can be thus kept under the power and dominion of the spirit, it constitutes a medium through which the spirit manifests its various qualities and capacities, and serves as an instrument for the performance of a great variety of uses in the natural world. But the human body is also subject to another and directly opposite influence. The laws of nature claim dominion over it, and are constantly seeking to assert and maintain that dominion, and the hour inevitably comes when it yields to those laws, and ceases to be of any use to the spirit, which then releases its grasp and the body returns to the kingdom of dead matter. It is at length dissolved and dissipated, and its various particles return to their appropriate places; the earth, the air and the water, each receiving its respective share. Its particles being thus returned into the various elementary forms of matter, continue to subserve the various purposes for which matter exists. Such is the certain and inevitable destiny which awaits the mortal body. Even while held together by the spirit's living energy it is every moment changing. It appears to be the same body from one year to another only because it is the same spirit that animates it, and retains its various and ever-changing particles in the same or a similar form. But when death removes it beyond the spirit's reach, it soon ceases to retain in any sense its identity as a human body. And will the various particles of the body thus dissolved and dissipated, ever be reorganized into a human body and given back to the spirit to which it once belonged?
We know that many great and learned men have entertained such an opinion, and continue to advocate it through the pulpit and the press. The doctrine of a literal resurrection of the material body is very clearly and forcibly expressed in its strictly orthodox form, in the following beautiful extract from a sermon by the Rev. Henry Melvill. The passage may also be found in No. 19, page 249 of the Christian Library, published by the American Tract Society. Mr. M. has long sustained the highest reputation as a pulpit orator, and is well known and highly esteemed as a talented and faithful expositor of those doctrines which are esteemed orthodox by the evangelical party, in the Church of England. A large volume of his Sermons has been republished in this country under the editorial charge of Bishop Mellvaine, of Ohio. Mr. Melvill says:
"We do not know, that, in the whole range of things effected by God, there is aught so surprising, regard being had only to the power displayed, as the resurrection of the body. If you will ponder, for a few moments, the facts of a resurrection, you will probably allow that the power which must be exerted in order to the final resurrection of every man's body, is more signal than that displayed in any spiritual renovation, or in any of those divine operations which we are able to trace in the visible universe. You are just to think that this framework of flesh, in which my soul is now enclosed, will be reduced at death to the dust from which it was taken. I cannot tell where or what will be my sepulchre—whether I shall sleep in one of the quiet church-yards of my own land, or be exposed on some foreign shore, or fall a prey to the beasts of the desert, or seek a tomb in the depths of the unfathomable waters. But an irreversible sentence has gone forth—"dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return"—and assuredly, ere many years, and perhaps even ere many days have elapsed, must my "earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved" rafter from rafter, beam from beam, and the particles, of which it has been curiously compounded, be separated from each other, and perhaps scattered to the four winds of heaven. And who will pretend to trace the wanderings of these particles? There is manifestly the most thorough possibility, that the elements of which my body is composed, may have belonged to the bone and flesh of successive generations; and that, when I shall have passed away and been forgótten, they will be again wrought into the structure of animated beings.
"And when you think that my body, at the resurrection, must have at least so much of its original matter as shall be necessary for the preservation of identity, for the making me know and feel myself the very same being who sinned, and suffered, and was disciplined on earth, you must allow that nothing short of infinite knowledge and power could prevail to the watching, and disentangling, and keeping duly separate, whatever is to be again builded into a habitation for my spirit, so that it may be brought together from the four ends of the earth, detached from other creatures, or extracted from other substances. This would be indeed a wonderful thing, if it were true of none but myself, if it were only in my solitary case that a certain portion of matter had thus to be watched, kept distinct though mingled, and appropriated to myself whilst belonging to others. But try to suppose the same holding good of every human being, of Adam, and each member of his countless posterity, and see whether the resurrection will not utterly confound and overburden the mind. To every individual in the interminable throng shall his own body be given, a body so literally, his own, that it shall be made up, to at least a certain extent, of the matter which composed it whilst he dwelt on this earth. And yet this matter may have passed through innumerable changes. It may have circulated through the living tribes of many generations; or it may have been waving in the trees of the forest; or it may have floated on the wide waters of the deep. But there has been an eye upon it in all its appropriations, and in all, its transformations; so that, just as though it had been indelibly stamped, from the first, with the name of the human being to whom it should finally belong, it has been unerringly reserved for the great day of resurrection. Thus myriads upon myriads of atoms—for you may count up till imagination is wearied, and then reckon that you have but one unit of the still inapproachable sum—myriads upon myriads of atoms, the dust of kingdoms, the ashes of all that have lived, are perperually jostled, and mingled, and separated, and animated, and swept away, and reproduced, and, nevertheless, not a solitary particle but holds itself ready, at the sound of the last trump, to combine itself with a multitude of others, in a human body in which they once met perhaps a thousand years before."
The above is written in a strong and beautiful style which I hope the reader will not fail to admire. But when he has sufficiently admired the highly finished form of the composition, he is most respectfully requested to contrast its sentiments with those contained in the following passages, taken from a little book entitled "The New Jerusalem, and its Heavenly Doctrine," by Emanuel Swedenborg:
"Man is so created, that as to his internal he cannot die, for he is capable of believing in God, and also of loving God, and thus of being conjoined to God by faith and love; and to be conjoined to God is to live to eternity.
"This internal is with every man who is born; his external is that by means of which he brings into effect the things which are of faith and love. The internal is what is called the spirit, and the external is what is called the body. The external, which is called the body, is accommodated to uses in the natural world; this is rejected when man dies; but the internal, which is called the spirit, is accommodated to uses in the spiritual world; this does not die. The internal is then a good spirit and an angel, if the man had been good when in the world, but an evil spirit, if the man had been evil when in the world.
"The spirit of man, after the death of the body, appears in the spiritual world in a human form, altogether as in the world; he enjoys also the faculty of seeing, of hearing, of speaking, of feeling, as in the world; and he is endowed with every faculty of thinking, of willing, and of acting as in the world. In a word, he is a man as to all things and every particular, except that he is not encompassed with that gross body which he had in the world; he leaves that when he dies, nor does he ever re-assume it.
"This continuation of life is what is understood by the resurrection. The reason why men believe that they are not to rise again before the last judgment, when also every visible object of the world is to perish, is because they have not understood the Word; and because sensual men place their life in the body, and believe that unless this were to live again, it would be all over with the man.
"The life of man after death is the life of his love and the life of his faith, hence such as his love and such as his faith had been, when he lived in the world, such his life remains to eternity. It is the life of hell with those who have loved themselves and the world above all things, and the life of heaven with those who have loved God above all things and their neighbours as themselves. The latter are they that have faith, but the former are they that have not faith. The life of heaven is what is called eternal life, and the life of hell is what is called spiritual death.
"That man lives after death, the Word teaches, as that God is not the God of the dead, but of the living, Matt. xxii. 31; that Lazarus after death was taken up into heaven, but the rich man cast into hell, Luke xvi. 22, 23, and the following verses; that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are there, Matt. viii. 11; chap. xxii. 31, 32; Luke xx. 37, 38; that Jesus said to the thief, To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise, Luke xxiii. 43."
The doctrine contained in the above extract is so clear and beautiful, and so perfectly in accordance with reason and the word of the Lord, that it is difficult to conceive on what ground it can be opposed. The words of the Lord as quoted by Swedenborg, are certainly a clear and distinct expression of the doctrine which we advocate. What could be plainer than the passage in Matthew, 22. 31. "But as touching the resurrection of the dead, have ye not read that which was spoken unto you by God, saying: I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead but of the living."
And in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the Lord distinctly teaches the same truth, that is, that both the good and the evil enter the spiritual world as living, intelligent active men, with all the powers and faculties which belong to organized spiritual beings, and are either happy or miserable, according to their life on earth.
There are also several instances recorded in the word of the Lord, of departed saints having appeared to the men of this world, and they always came as living, active men, organized spiritual beings. When Peter, James and John saw Moses and Elias, those ancient prophets were talking with the Lord, which clearly implies that they were not simply disembodied minds, but that they had organized, spiritual bodies; and it is difficult to imagine that those bodies would receive any additional beauty or perfection by being again clothed with the dust which they once left in this natural world. An angel who appeared to St. John, declared to him, "I am thy fellow servant, and of thy brethren the prophets;" and yet he seemed to the apostle like a living man, for he says, "I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things."
But while the word of the Lord thus plainly and distinctly teaches that the dead are already raised with spiritual bodies, and are living in the spiritual world, it must be acknowledged that there are certain passages which, taken simply in their literal sense, would seem at the first glance to teach the doctrine of a literal resurrection of the dead body. Our Lord says: "Verily, verily, I say unto you; the hour is coming and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live." And again he adds; "The hour is coming when all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation."
Now it will readily be seen that there are insuperable objections against understanding these words as referring to the resurrection of the material body. For the Lord says that "the hour is coming and now is," and yet nearly two thousand years have rolled away, while the bodies of the myriads that have died in ages past are still confined to the kingdom of dead matter. So that a literal resurrection of the dead body cannot be the meaning of our Lord's words. And an equally strong objection exists against understanding the latter passage in a similar way. For the words declare that "all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth." That which comes forth from the grave, is the same that hears the voice. But we know that the dead body has no power to hear the voice of the Son of God; and with equal certainty we may know that the dead body will never come forth from the grave. But let us read these passages as referring to the resurrection of the spirit, from the dark and gloomy grave of spiritual death, to a life of heavenly love and truth, and we see at once the truth, beauty and harmony of our Lord's words.
The first reason, therefore, which we give for believing that the last judgment takes place in the spiritual world is, that the spirits of all the dead are in that world, and from all that we can learn from the word of the Lord, from the laws of our being, or from the analogies of nature, those spirits will never, can never return to this natural world, and clothe themselves with their former material bodies; and it is scarcely necessary to insist upon so plain a truism as that the spirit must be judged in that world where it is.
And what possible reason can be given why the material body should be brought back from the kingdom of dead matter to be rewarded or punished with the spirit to which it once belonged? That body consists simply of a collection of material particles, which, when separated from the spirit, have neither life, sensation nor intelligence. They are in no sense responsible for any thing the spirit has done.— While held together by the spirit's vital force, they constitute a medium through which its qualities and capacities are manifested—an instrument with which it acts. But the rewards of happiness or misery certainly belong to the voluntary agent—to the living and conscious spirit, not to the unconscious instrument. For if it could be supposed possible that the particles of matter which compose the mortal body at the time of its dissolution, are, at some future time, to be brought back from the kingdom of dead matter in order to be rewarded or punished with the spirit to which they once belonged, the same justice would demand that every particle of matter that ever entered into the composition of that body at any period of its existence should be dealt with in an equally severe manner. And I am unable to see why the same law would not with equal justice and reason include every particle of matter which men have ever used in doing either good or evil. Can any man tell me why the pen which I am now using is not as justly responsible for the sentiments which I am expressing, as the hand in which I hold that pen? Each is equally subject to my will, and if the materiel of which the one is composed is to be brought into judgment for these sentiments, by what rule of justice can the other escape?
But I fear the reader may think that I am paying a poor compliment to his understanding, in detaining him so long upon a question which appears self-evident. I trust he will permit me to find a sufficient apology in the fact, that there are multitudes of men of great influence and learning, who still defend the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the material body with as much zeal as if all their hopes of salvation rested upon it. Within the last few days, I have seen a book just published, under high authority, written for the sole purpose of defending this doctrine, which is there gravely declared to be "the great central truth of revealed religion." But we may be permitted to thank God, that the divine light of heavenly truth is rapidly flowing into the human mind, and that we have reason to hope that the time is not far distant, when arguments will cease to be necessary for the purpose of showing the absurdity of the doctrine of the literal resurrection of the material body.
Such a doctrine is not only opposed to reason and the word of the Lord, but it offers direct violence to our natural and spontaneous anticipations,—to our fondest hopes.— What could be more withering to the hopes of a dying christian, who, having passed through the sorrows and temptations of this natural life, is approaching the threshold of the world of spirits, and is thirsting for the pure joys and extended usefulness of a life in heaven,—what could be more unwelcome to such a spirit, in such an hour, than to be told of returning again to this natural world at some future time, for the purpose of reclaiming that mortal body which it is about to leave? I have witnessed many a death bed scene, and have seen the departing spirit cheered and encouraged by the hope of an eternal and happy life; but I have never seen nor heard of an instance where the most devoted advocate of the doctrine of a literal resurrection attempted to use that doctrine for the purpose of consoling or encouraging a dying man. In the halls of religious controversy, this doctrine may be magnified into a question of immense importance; but in the hour of death, and especially from the chamber where the good man dies, it withdraws and stands rebuked. There it is never named. The place is too near to that world into whose pure and heavenly light such strange and absurd doctrines can never come.