gated band, set the world a glorious example of an active faith, which they are the happiest who best can imitate: and, seeing faith hath been shown to partake in its beginnings of the evidence of consciousness itself, and to hold of those first principles of knowledge and intellect of which it cannot be doubted that they are the immediate gift of God, let us all believe; and let us pray to the Father to shed more and more of the light of his Holy Spirit, and to help our unbelief.

SERMON XLIII.

And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as He is pure.-1 JOHN iii. 3.*

THAT the future bliss of the saints in glory will in part at least consist in certain exquisite sensations of delight, --not such as the debauched imagination of the Arabian impostor prepared for his deluded followers, in his paradise of dalliance and revelry,—but that certain exquisite sensations of delight, produced by external objects acting upon corporeal organs, will constitute some part of the happiness of the just, is a truth with no less certainty deducible from the terms in which the Holy Scriptures describe the future life, than that corporal sufferance, on the other hand, will make a part of the punishment of the wicked.

Indeed, were holy writ less explicit upon the subject than it is, either proposition, that the righteous shall be corporally blessed, and the wicked corporally punished, seems a necessary and immediate inference from the promised resurrection of the body: for to what purpose of God's wisdom or of his justice to what purpose of the

* Preached at the Anniversary of the Institution of the Magdalen Hospital, April 22, 1795.

creature's own existence, should the soul either of saint or sinner be reunited to the body, as we are taught in Scripture to believe the souls of both shall be, unless the body is in some way or another to be the instrument of enjoyment to the one and of suffering to the other? Or how is the union of any mind to any body to be understood, without a constant sympathy between the two, by virtue of which they are reciprocally appropriated to each other, in such sort that this individual mind becomes the soul of that individual body, and that body the body of this mind, -the energies of the mind being modified after a certain manner by the state and circumstances of the body to which it is attached, and the motions of the body governed under certain limitations by the will and desires of the mind? Without this sympathy, the soul could have no dominion over the body it is supposed to animate, nor bear, indeed, any nearer relation to it than to any other mass of extraneous matter: this, which I call my body, would in truth no more be mine than the body of the planet Jupiter: I could have no more power to put my own limbs in motion, as I find I do, by the mere act of my own will, than to invert the revolutions of the spheres; which were in effect to say, that no such thing as animation could take place. But this sympathy between soul and body being once established, it is impossible but that the conscious soul must be pleasurably or otherwise affected, according to the various impressions of external objects upon the body which it animates. Thus, that in the future state of retribution, the good will enjoy corporal pleasure and the bad suffer corporal pain, would be a necessary consequence of that reunion of the soul and the body which we are taught to expect at the last day, had the Holy Scriptures given no other information upon the subject.

But they are explicit in the assertion of this doctrine. With respect to the wicked, the case is so very plain that it is unnecessary to dwell upon the proof. With respect

to the righteous, the thing might seem more doubtful, except so far as it is deducible, in what manner I have shown, from the general doctrine of the resurrection,— were it not for one very explicit and decisive passage in the second of St. Paul's Epistles to the Corinthians. This passage hath unfortunately lost somewhat, in our public translation, of the precision of the original text, by an injudicious insertion of unnecessary words, meant for illustration, which have nothing answering to them in the original, and serve only to obscure what they were intended to elucidate. By the omission of these unnecessary words, without any other amendment of the translation, the passage in our English Bibles will be restored to its genuine perspicuity; and it will be found to contain a direct and positive assertion of the doctrine we have laid down. "We must all appear," says the apostle, "before the judgment-seat of Christ." And this is the end for which all must appear before that awful tribunal, -namely, "That every one may receive the things in the body, according to that he hath done, whether good or bad;"* that is to say, that every one may receive in his body such things as shall be analogous to the quality of his deeds, whether good or bad,-good things in the body, if his deeds have been good; bad things, if bad. Thus, the end for which all are destined to appear before

*Ta dia tov σwμaros-not ill rendered by the Vulgate, propria corporis. But this rendering, though the Latin words, rightly understood, convey the true sense of the Greek, has given occasion, through a misapprehension of the true force of the word propria, to those paraphrastic rendering which we find in our English Bible, and in many other modern translations; which entirely conceal the particular interest the body hath in this passage. To the same misapprehension of the true sense of the Vulgate, we owe, as I suspect, a various reading of the Greek text-idia for ra dia, which appears in the Complutensian and some old editions; and is very injudiciously approved by Grotius, and by Mills, if I understand him right; though it has not the authority of a single Greek manuscript, or the decided authority of any one of the Greek fathers, to support it. The Syriac renders the true sense of the Greek, Ta dia Tou owμaros, with precision and without ambiguity.

the judgment-seat of Christ is declared by the apostle to be this, that every individual may be rewarded with corporal enjoyment, or punished with corporal pain, according as his behaviour in this life shall have been found to have been generally good or bad, upon an exact account taken of his good and evil deeds.

What those external enjoyments will be which will make a portion of our future bliss-in what particulars they will consist, we are not informed; probably for this reason, because our faculties, in their present imperfect and debased state, the sad consequence of Adam's fall, are not capable of receiving the information. And yet we are not left destitute of some general knowledge, of no inconsiderable importance.

It is explicitly revealed to us, that these joys will be exquisite in a degree of which, in our present state, we have neither sense nor apprehension. "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, such good things as God hath prepared for them that love him." Numberless and ravishing are the beauties which the mortal eye beholds in the various works of creation and of art! Elegant and of endless variety the entertainments which are provided for the ear,-whether it delight to listen to the sober narratives of history, or the wild fictions of romance,-whether it hearken to the grave lessons of the moralist, to the abstruse demonstrations of science, the round periods of eloquence, the sprightly flourishes of rhetoric, the smooth numbers and bold flights of poetry, or catch the enchanting sounds of harmony-that poetry which sings in its inspired strains the wonders of creating power and redeeming love-that harmony which fans the pure flame of devotion, and wafts our praises upon its swelling notes to the eternal throne of God! Infinite is the multitude of pleasurable forms which Fancy's own creation can at will call forth: but in all this inexhaustible treasure of external gratifications with which this present world is

up

stored, amidst all the objects which move the senses with pleasure, and fill the admiring soul with rapture and delight, nothing is to be found which may convey to our present faculties so much as a remote conception of those transporting scenes which the better world in which they shall be placed shall hereafter present to the children of God's love.

It is farther revealed to us, that these future enjoyments of the body will be widely different in kind from the pleasures which in our present state result even from the most innocent and lawful gratifications of the corporeal appetites. "In the resurrection, they neither marry," saith our Lord, "nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels of God in heaven."

But this is not all: another circumstance is revealed to us, which opens to our hope so high a prospect as must fill the pious soul no less with wonder than with love. It is plainly intimated, that the good things which the righteous will receive in their bodies will be the same in kind, ---far inferior, doubtless, in degree,---but the same they will be in kind, which are enjoyed by the human nature of our Lord, in its present state of exaltation at the right hand of God. It is revealed to us, that our capacity of receiving the good things prepared for us will be the effect of a change to be wrought in our bodies at Christ's second coming, by which they will be transformed into the likeness of the glorified body of our Lord. "The first man," saith St. Paul," was of the earth, moulded of the clay; the second man is the Lord from heaven." " And as we have borne the image of the man of clay, we shall also bear the image of the man in heaven." And in another place, "We look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body, according to the working whereby he is able to subdue all things unto himself." This change the same apostle in another place calls "the redemption of the body;" and he speaks of it as "the adoption," for