Social, and Religious Life of Man. 199 



to be cast aside as vile and worthless, but as something 

 which may, without disembodiment, be spiritualized and 

 glorified as something which, like the body of angels 

 and other celestial beings, may at one time be not 

 unlike an ordinary human body, and at another trans- 

 figured or translated as something which is changeable 

 in a way which will appear natural to every child, and 

 which cannot appear altogether unnatural even to the 

 most matter-of-fact man. The child turns towards this 

 view instinctively, and if the man does not do so it is 

 because his instincts are blunted and not allowed to 

 have free play. In other words, there is an imaginative 

 faculty in both child and man which compels the reason 

 to listen believingly, not only to what is revealed about 

 the body terrestrial and the body celestial, and the 

 mutual convertibility of the two, but also to what the 

 poets have had to say upon the subject at all times and 

 in all places. And, after all, there need not be any 

 grave disagreement between the imagination and the 

 reason in this matter, for after what has been said upon 

 unity in diversity and diversity in unity, in form and 

 force, the reason must allow that the transitory earthly 

 body is associated with a form -which is not transitory, 

 and which, for anything that appears to the contrary, 

 may be the very spiritual body of which the Scriptures 

 speak so plainly. 



What is revealed respecting God is also consistent with 

 what is revealed respecting man in this matter. The God 

 of the Scriptures is made known as walking and talking 

 with Adam before his fall, as talking and eating with 

 Abraham, as wrestling with Jacob, as appearing in glory to 

 Ezekiel and S. John, but nowhere as mere disembodied 

 Spirit. There is, so to speak, a distinct anthropomorphic 

 element in the revelation of the Divine Being which is 



