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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



some stinging words about some good work for j 

 God and for their world. And as many of us 

 want the shaking now badly enough, I can thank 

 him for it, although it is administered by an 

 over-rough and contemptuous hand. 



I feel some hearty sympathy, too, with much 

 which he says about the unity of the man. The 

 passage to which I refer commences on page 242 

 with the words " The philosophy which treats 

 man as man simply affirms that man loves, 

 thinks, acts, not that the ganglia, the senses, or 

 any organ of man, loves, thinks, and acts." 



So far as Mr. Harrison's language and line of 

 thought are a protest against the vague, blood- 

 less, bodiless notion of the life of the future, 

 which has more affinity with Hades than with 

 heaven, I heartily thank him for it. Man is an 

 embodied spirit, and wherever his lot is cast he 

 will need and will have the means of a spirit's 

 manifestation to and action on its surrounding 

 world. But this is precisely what is substan- 

 tiated by the resurrection. The priceless value 

 of the truth of the resurrection lies in the close 

 interlacing and interlocking of the two worlds 

 which it reveals. It is the life which is lived 

 here, the life of the embodied spirit, which is 

 carried through the veil and lived there. The 

 wonderful powers of the gospel of " Jesus and 

 the resurrection " lay in the homely human inter- 

 est which it lent to the life of the immortals. 

 The risen Lord took up life just where he left 

 it. The things which he had taught his disci- 

 ples to care about here, were the things which 

 those who had passed on were caring about 

 there, the reign of truth, righteousness, and love. 

 I hold to the truth of the resurrection, not only 

 because it appears to be firmly established on 

 the most valid testimony, but because it alone 

 seems to explain man's constitution as a spirit 

 embodied in flesh which he is sorely tempted to 

 curse as a clog. It furnishes to man the key to 

 the mystery of the flesh on the one hand, while 

 on the other it justifies his aspiration and real- 

 izes his hope. 



Belief in the risen and reigning Christ was at 

 the heart of that wonderful uprising and outburst 

 of human energy which marked the age of the 

 Advent. The contrast is most striking between 

 the sad and even despairing tone which breathes 

 through the noblest heathen literature, which 

 utlers perhaps its deepest wail in the cry of 

 Epictetus, "Show me a Stoic — by Heaven, I long 

 to see a Stoic ! " and the sense of victorious pow- 

 er, of buoyant, exulting hope, which breathes 

 through the word and shines from the life of 



the infant Church : " As dying, and behold we 

 live ; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing ; as poor, 

 yet making many rich ; as having nothing, and yet 

 possessing all things." The Gospel which brought 

 life and immortality to light won its way just as 

 dawn wins it way, when "jocund day stands tip- 

 toe on the misty mountain-tops," and flashes his 

 rays over a sleeping world. Everywhere the 

 radiance penetrates ; it shines into every nook 

 of shade; and all living creatures stir, awake, 

 and come forth to bask in its beams. Just thus 

 the flood of kindling light streamed forth from 

 the resurrection, and spread like the dawn in the 

 morning sky ; it touched all forms of things in a 

 dark, sad world with its splendor, and called 

 man forth from the tomb in which his higher 

 life seemed to be buried, to a new career of 

 fruitful, sunlit activity ; even as the Saviour 

 prophesied, " 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." 



The exceeding readiness and joyfulness with 

 which the truth was welcomed, and the meas- 

 ure in which Christendom — and that means 

 all that is most powerful and progressive in 

 human society — has been moulded by it, are 

 the most notable facts of history. Be it truth, 

 be it fiction, be it dream, one thing is clear : 

 it was a baptism of new life to the world which 

 was touched by it, and it has been near the 

 heart of all the great movements of human so- 

 ciety from that day until now. I do not even 

 exclude " the Revolution," whose current is un- 

 der us still. Space is precious, or it would not 

 be difficult to show how deeply the Revolution 

 was indebted to the ideas which this gospel 

 brought into the world. I entirely agree with 

 Lord Blachford that revelation is the ground 

 on which faith securely rests. But the history 

 of the quickening and the growth of Christian 

 society is a factor of enormous moment in the 

 estimation of the arguments for the truth of im- 

 mortality. We are assured that the idea had the 

 dullest and even basest origin. Man has a shad- 

 ow, it suggested the idea of a second self to him ! 

 he has memories of departed friends, he gave 

 them a body and made them ghosts ! Very won- 

 derful, surely, that mere figments should be the 

 strongest and most productive things in the 

 whole sphere of human activity, and should have 

 stirred the spirit and led the march of the strong- 

 est, noblest, and most cultivated peoples ; until 

 now, in this nineteenth century, we think that 

 we have discovered, as Miss Martineau tersely 

 puts it, that "the theological belief of almost 



