e God of the dead, but of the
living." St. Paul has described the clothing of the spirit in a new and
glorious body, taking the analogy from the living germ in the seed of the
plant, which is not quickened till after apparent death; and the
catastrophe of our planet, which, it is revealed, is to be destroyed and
purified by fire before it is fitted for the habitation of the blest, is
in perfect harmony with the view I have ventured to suggest.

_Eub_.--I cannot make your notions coincide with what I have been
accustomed to consider the meaning of Holy Writ. You allow everything
belonging to the material life to be dependent upon the organisation of
the body, and yet you imagine the spirit after death clothed with a new
body; and, in the system of rewards and punishments, this body is
rendered happy or miserable for actions committed by another and extinct
frame. A particular organisation may impel to improper and immoral
gratification; it does not appear to me, according to the principles of
eternal justice, that the body of the resurrection should be punished for
crimes dependent upon a conformation now dissolved and destroyed.

_The Unknown_.--Nothing is more absurd, I may say more impious, than for
man, with a ken surrounded by the dense mists of sense, to reason
respecting the decrees of eternal justice. You adopt here the same
limited view that you embraced in reasoning against the indestructibility
of the sentient principle in man from the apparent division of the living
principle in the polypus, not recollecting that to prove a quality can be
increased or exalted does not prove that it can be annihilated. If there
be, which I think cannot be doubted, a consciousness of good and evil
constantly belonging to the sentient principle in man, then rewards and
punishments naturally belong to acts of this consciousness, to obedience,
or disobedience; and the indestructibility of the sentient being is
necessary to the decrees of eternal justice. On your view, even in this
life, just punishments for crimes would be almost impossible; for the
materials of which human beings are composed change rapidly, and in a few
years probably not an atom of the primitive structure remains yet even
the materialist is obliged in old age to do penance for the sins of his
youth, and does not complain of the injustice of his decrepit body,
entirely changed and made stiff by time, suffering for the intemperance
of his youthful flexible