t adorable Redeemer, who, Paul says, loved
him and gave himself for him, and for whom, he says, he had suffered the
loss of all things. The sight of the man Christ Jesus wearing Paul's
nature in a glorified state, no doubt lived and glowed in his memory
after his return to earth, and made him think of the resurrection as the
event, in his personal history, to which every thing else was
subordinate. He shows the interest which he felt in this event, when,
writing to the Romans, he says, "And not only they,"--that is, "the
creatures," or creation,--"but ourselves, also, which have the first
fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting
for the adoption, to wit, the redemption, of our body." In his address,
at Jerusalem, before his accusers and the people, he cried out, "Of the
hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question." It was
uniformly a prominent topic of his thoughts.

It is by no means impossible, nor improbable, judging from analogy, that
there may be, in the human soul, faculties which are slumbering, until
a glorified body assists in their development. Persons born blind have
the dormant faculty of seeing; the gift of the eye would bring it into
exercise. So of the other senses, and their related mental faculties.
With a glorified body, then, truly it doth not yet appear what we shall
be; but the thought itself is rapture, that our souls at present may be
as disproportioned to their future expansion, as the acorn is to the oak
of a century's growth, which is infolded now, and dormant, in the seed.

The addition of a body to the glorified spirit will, therefore, be a
help, and not an encumbrance. For we are not to suppose that the soul,
after having been for centuries in a state superior to its present
condition, would retrograde, in returning to the body. A common idea
respecting a body is, that it is necessarily a clog. True, by reason of
sin and its effects, it is now a "vile body;" and Paul speaks of it as
"the body of this death." But, even while we are in this world, a body
is an indispensable help to the soul. The disembodied spirit, probably,
is not capable of sustaining a full, active relation to a world of
matter; a material form is necessary to make its powers serviceable
here. This being so, there is certainly reason, from analogy, to suppose
that the addition of a spiritual body to the glorified soul will not
necessarily work any deterioration to the spirit. At