can be secured from nothing else. And suppose we could. take a public vote, that all these trades and professions and slavish tasks were unnecessary, and should all give up our work, what would become of us? Have we not all as good a right to do this as any have? And what is the result to those who evade the exertion and the task of life? Do they win success and honor? Do they find satisfaction in indolence, or pleasure, or dissipation? No; when they forego employment, they also forego respectability, success, honor, and inward comfort. Their life becomes a waste. They generally die young, and it is better on the whole that they should. Or if they live to age, they run down into insignificance and poverty. Their shattered frames show that something beside care and labor will wear men out, and their dreary, friendless state shows that they have outlived their gay companionship.

Yet while we thus in our Plan of Life face with a cheer

a

ful purpose the daily tasks of some honorable, useful work, we must be careful not to grow to our employment, nor to become a part of our tools. We must endeavor to cultivate a genial nature, to be something out of our employment as well as in it, to provide ourselves with resources, to refine and improve our characters, and to do justice to all the softening influences of social life. We cannot all be scholars, nor do we need to be; for scholar is far from being the highest exhibition of man. We cannot all be persons of taste or accomplishments, and the mere dabblers in such matters are positive nuisances in society. But we can all have a Plan of Life which, after answering the ends of business, shall enable us to cultivate more or less our social, friendly, neighborly feelings, our unselfish feelings, our public spirit. It is, after all, the order in which the desirable ends of life are to be pursued, the order of them, which shall stand first, and what second, and so on,-it is this which is the great condition of a good Plan of Life. Duty, this is first by every law of God and of reason, and the

successive parts of our plan are but contingent, because prosperity and wealth and success and happiness are ever uncertain in this world.

Now this or any other good Plan of Life must have a law, a foundation principle, a serious, solemn conviction, to help in forming it, and, what is more, to encourage and secure the performance of it. And there is a strong reluctance in many minds to face a serious view of life. Self-will, pleasure, carelessness, folly, all conspire to countenance many in trifling with life, or at least in thinking that it is of no great consequence whether it bring anything to pass for time or eternity. Now that some who have attempted to give a serious view of life have given only a gloomy, repulsive view of it, and have gathered frightful bugbears about it, may be allowed. But, after all, it is a serious thing to live, that is, to live many years amid all the risks and responsibilities of society. And religion is not the only thing that makes life serious and solemn. Far, far otherwise. Indeed, we have all of us, religious or irreligious, to meet about the same amount of seriousness, to have about as many thoughtful or sombre hours, in the course of life. The seriousness which religion gives to life, a reasonable, truly Christian view of it, is far less sombre or solemn than the seriousness which attends folly or self-reproach, or even an idle, unprofitable life. Is there any seriousness which exceeds in deep, wretched sadness that of an unprincipled or abandoned man in some hour of self-reproach, when by those mysterious workings of the memory the fair visions of an innocent youth come back to him, all tattered and stained by his later depravity? Is there any seriousness more appalling than that with which the gambler turns from an unsuccessful cast, and owns himself a beggar, a fool, a madman? Is there any seriousness more bitter than that of the victim of intemperance when the stings of his own vice pierce him, and he feels that he is imbruted and self-destroyed? Is there any seriousness in religion, any sadness in it, worse

than that of any bad habit, any folly, any way of wasting life? Seriousness! we must all yield to it in some shape, for it is the shadow of the spirit cast upon this earthly life; it is the token of a heart that the earth cannot satisfy, of a desire that existence here does not fill.

Let us admit seriousness, then, into our Plan of Life. And let it find us willing, yes, glad to hear what it will counsel us. Its tones are solemn: we need them. Its words are warnings: they will do us good. Their echoes vibrate through the days of the year that has closed; their lessons address us as we enter upon the year that has begun. "Wherefore gird up the loins of your mind: be sober, and hope to the end," for the grace that is to be brought unto you at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

RESURRECTION OF THE NATURAL BODY.

THE student of the New Testament must be aware that the notion of the resurrection of dead bodies is nowhere recognized nor implied. The resurrection of the dead is enounced by Christ, and philosophically expounded by St. Paul. The resurrection of the flesh not only is not asserted, but virtually denied. We shall rise in "spiritual bodies," since "flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." It becomes a very interesting inquiry, Whence originated this dogma of a resurrection of dead bodies? how came it in the Christian Church? and why is it tenaciously retained?

At the time of Christ's appearing there were three principal sects among the Jews, the Pharisees, the Essenes, and the Sadducees. The first believed in the resurrection of the material body; the second believed in the immortality of the soul, and future rewards and punishments, but rejected with horror the Pharisaic notion of the resurrection; the

third believed in no future state at all, denying the existence both of spirits and angels. That the Pharisees derived their doctrine from their own Scriptures it would be vain to assert, for it is nowhere to be found in them. The only passage which has any appearance of lending it support is Job xix. 25-27, and this is by a false rendering, as any one may see by reference to Dr. Noyes's exceedingly lucid translation. It was not a doctrine of the early Hebrews, and was not found among the Jews until after the Babylonish captivity. It appears abundantly in the Talmud, the Jewish commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, but not in the Scriptures themselves.

It is interesting to know that the doctrine in all its grossness was held by a sect of the Chaldæans at the time of the Jewish captivity. The Magians or Fire-worshippers had existed for a long time before, and their religion was reformed by Zoroaster, probably not long previous to the reign of Cyrus. Their creed was, that there are two principles, one of Light and one of Darkness, both contending for the supremacy of this world. The good at death go away to the abodes of Light; the bad are dragged down into Darkness; but the day will come when the bodies of all men will be raised, and reconstructed from the dust, and purified for the souls which had been separated from them to reenter and dwell in on the renovated Earth. They believed the heavenly bodies to be animated with souls, and worshipped the sun under the symbol of fire, which was ever kept burning upon their altars.

After the restoration from the captivity this doctrine of the resurrection of dead bodies appears among the Jews,

* Prideaux's Connexion, Vol. I. p. 196. The Zend-Avesta, by Anquetil du Perron, as quoted by Dr. Bailey, Vol. II. p. 412. Either Dr. Prideaux's authorities misled him, or the Zend-Avesta of Perron does not give the genuine theory of Zoroaster. According to the former authority, he believed in the everlasting punishment of the wicked; according to the latter, in their ultimate purification and happiness. It is agreed, however, that he taught the resurrection of the nat ural body.

and it was an essential article in the creed of the Pharisees. They did not hold it, however, precisely as the Magians held it. The Magians believed that all souls, good and bad, would find their lost bodies, and live happily upon the Earth. The Pharisees believed that all souls would be raised out of Hades to a judgment upon the Earth, but only the righteous would find their bodies again and live happily in a terrestrial Paradise; the wicked would be thrust down again without their bodies, and be shut up in Gehenna, the lowest region of Hades, to remain there forever.*

Such was the state of opinion when the Christian Church was formed, partly from Jewish converts, believers already in the resurrection of the natural body. The dogma, however, does not appear in the primitive Christian Church. The Apostolic fathers, that is, the Christian fathers who lived in the age immediately succeeding that of the Apostles themselves, Barnabas, Clement, and Ignatius particularly, — speak of the resurrection, but only as Christ and his Apostles had done. They say nothing of the resurrection of dead bodies. The truth is, as we suppose, it had not been made a matter of thought and investigation, and no theories had been formed about it. The Jewish converts would naturally put a Jewish interpretation upon the words; the others would not philosophize upon the subject at all, while the glory of the ascended Christ was yet open to their vision and absorbed them into it. It was no time to build theories while the heart was warm, and immortality was not a matter of speculation, but of sight. Towards the close of the second century, however, a change becomes apparent, and we hear for the first time under Christianity of "the resurrection of the flesh." The old Jewish dogma is reproduced with this addition, that not the righteous only, but also the wicked, will be clothed in their lost bodies at the judgment day, the former to dwell in Paradise, the lat

*Josephus, Wars, II. 10. 14.