) uses the similitude of the seed: but his argument is a
totally different one. St. Paul bids us not be troubled in what form the
dead shall be raised; for as we sow "not the body that shall be, but bare
grain, it may chance of wheat or of some other grain," so God will raise
the dead in what form it pleases Him: in other words, he tells us that
since bare grain may turn into such wonderful and wonderfully different
things as wheat, barley, oats, rye, in this world, we need not marvel that
bare human bodies planted here should be raised in wonderful form
hereafter. Objections may be urged against this illustration: I am only
concerned to point out that it illustrates an argument entirely different
from the common pulpit one, which (I suspect) we should have to endure far
less frequently were it our custom to burn our dead, and did not interment
dig a trap for facile rhetoric.

Further, St. Paul's particular warning, if it do not consciously contain,
at least suggests, a general warning against interpreting the future life
in terms of this one, whereas its delights and pains can have little or
nothing in common with ours. We try to imagine them by expanding or
exaggerating and perpetuating ours--or some of them; but the attempt is
demonstrably foolish, and leads straight to its own defeat. It comes of
man's incapacity to form a conception of Eternity, or at any rate to grasp
and hold it long enough to reason about it; by reason of which incapacity
he falls back upon the easier, misleading conception of 'Everlasting
Life.' In Eternity time is not: a man dies into it to-day and awakes
(say) yesterday, for in Eternity yesterday and to-day and to-morrow are
one, and ten thousand years is as one day. This vacuum of time you may
call 'Everlasting Life,' but it clearly differs from what men ordinarily
and almost inevitably understand by 'Everlasting Life,' which to them is
an endless prolongation of time. Therefore, when they imagine heaven as
consisting of an endless prolongation and exaggeration or rarefication of
such pleasures as we know, they invite the retort, "And pray what would
become of any one of our known pleasures, or even of our conceivable
pleasures, if it were made everlasting?" As Jowett asked, with his usual
dry sagacity, in his Introduction to the _Phaedo_--

"What is the pain that does not become deadened after a thousand
years? or what is the nature of that pleasure or happiness which