wy home of the departed, in a state of existence
which is only a sort of dream or sleep compared with that which they
have left. From this under-world Jesus returned, "the first-fruits of
them that slept." All who believe in Him will do the same sooner or
later, will resume their physical bodies, and, like Him, ascend to the
world above the sky. But seeing this geocentric cosmogony has been
impossible for centuries past, why should we go on trying to squeeze
Paul's language so as to mean something else than what it meant at
first? Granted that he was right in believing, in company with all the
rest of the primitive church, that Jesus showed Himself to the
disciples after His crucifixion, what more do we need? Paul's theory
as to the resurrection of every physical body is just nonsense in the
light of our larger knowledge of the universe and its laws, and we may
as well say so.

+Paul's mystical view of resurrection.+--But we should do Paul an
injustice if we were to limit the value of his utterances by his views
about the resurrection of the human body. I have already pointed out
that Paul employs physical symbols in a mystical way, and in nothing
was this more so than in his use of the idea of a resurrection. With
him, as with the writer of the fourth gospel, the spiritual
resurrection was the uprising, going-forward, issuing-forth, of the
Christ or divine man within the soul. When he speaks in this way he
allows the thought of a physical resurrection to drop out of sight.
Thus he writes: "If we have been planted together in the likeness of
His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection."
"That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the
fellowship of His sufferings, being made conformable unto His death; if
by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead." "If
then ye be risen with Christ seek the things which are above, where
Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.... For ye died, and your life
is hid with Christ in God." Even if this last sentence is not Paul's
own it has a distinctly Pauline ring. In his maturer thought the great
apostle seems to have escaped the limitations of his early Pharisaism.
He ceases to speak of the sleep or the under-world, and begins to think
of death as the gateway to the immediate presence of his dearly loved
Master. "For I long to depart and to be with Christ which is far
better." Here, surely, we are listening to the voice o