Survival of the Fittest. 465 
Spirit.” Therefore, the proof of the apostle’s proposition, 
that there is a zatural body as distinct from a spiritual body, 
lies in the testimony that “Adam was made into @ Living 
soul, showing that he considered a natural, or animal body, 
and a living soul, as one and the same thing. If he did not, 
then there was no proof in the quotation of what he 
affirmed. Mortality, then, is life manifested through a cor- 
ruptible body, and immortality is life manifested through an 
incorruptible body. Hence, the necessity laid down in the 
saying of the apostle, “this corruptible body must put on 
incorruption, and this mortal put on immortality,” before 
death can be “ swallowed up in victory,”—a doctrine of “ life 
and incorruptibility ”’ that was new to the Greeks and Romans, 
and brought to light only through the gospel of the kingdom 
and name of Jesus Christ. To them it was foolishness, and to 
many at the present day incredible, because they do not 
understand the glad tidings of the age to come. God could 
have created all things upon a spiritual or incorruptible basis 
at once, but in that case the globe would have been filled 
with men and women equal to the angels in nature, power 
and intellect, and hence would have been without a history, 
and its population characterless. And this would not have 
been according to His plan, for in it the animal must precede 
the spiritual just as surely as the acorn must precede the oak. 
The Bible has to do with things and not with imaginations ; 
with bodies and not phantasms; with “ving souls of every 
species; with corporcal beings of other worlds, and with 
incorruptible and undying men, but is as silent as the grave 
about such sou/s as men pretend to cure. For the sons of 
Adam to become sons of God, they must be the subjects of 
an adoption, which is attainable only by a divinely appointed 
means. It must be by a process of selection. “Since by a 
man came death, by a man also came a resurrection of dead 
persons. For as in the Adam they all die, so also in the 
Christ shall they all be made alive. But every one in his 
order. Christ the first fruits; afterward they that are Christ's 
