sion in describing
the process, reverting to the figure of the "mirror," dear to
Mysticism, which he had already used in the First Epistle: "We all
with unveiled face reflecting as a mirror the glory of the Lord, are
transformed into the same image from glory to glory." Other passages,
which refer primarily to the future state, are valuable as showing
that St. Paul lends no countenance to that abstract idea of eternal
life as freedom from all earthly conditions, which has misled so many
mystics. Our hope, when the earthly house of our tabernacle is
dissolved, is not that we may be unclothed, but that we may be
_clothed upon_ with our heavenly habitation. The body of our
humiliation is to be changed and glorified, according to the mighty
working whereby God is able to subdue all things unto Himself. And
therefore our whole spirit and soul _and body_ must be preserved
blameless; for the body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, not the
prison-house of a soul which will one day escape out of its cage and
fly away.

St. Paul's conception of Christ as the Life as well as the Light of
the world has two consequences besides those which have been already
mentioned. In the first place, it is fatal to religious individualism.
The close unity which joins us to Christ is not so much a unity of the
individual soul with the heavenly Christ, as an organic unity of all
men, or, since many refuse their privileges, of all Christians, with
their Lord. "We, being many, are one body in Christ, and severally
members one of another.[98]" There must be "no schism in the
body,[99]" but each member must perform its allotted function. St.
Augustine is thoroughly in agreement with St. Paul when he speaks of
Christ and the Church as "unus Christus." Not that Christ is
"divided," so that He cannot be fully present to any individual--that
is an error which St. Paul, St. Augustine, and the later mystics all
condemn; but as the individual cannot reach his real personality as an
isolated unit, he cannot, as an isolated unit, attain to full
communion with Christ.

The second point is one which may seem to be of subordinate
importance, but it will, I think, awaken more interest in the future
than it has done in the past. In the 8th chapter of the Epistle to the
Romans, St. Paul clearly teaches that the victory of Christ over sin
and death is of import, not only to humanity, but to the whole of
creation, which now groans and travails in pain together, but w