ord's answer to the Sadducees;
and, as their question was put in evident profaneness, and the
answer to it is one which to our minds is quite obvious and natural,
so we are apt to think that in this particular story there is less
than usual that particularly concerns us. But it so happens, that
our Lord, in answering the Sadducees, has brought in one of the most
universal and most solemn of all truths,--which is indeed implied
in many parts of the Old Testament, but which the Gospel has
revealed to us in all its fullness,--the truth contained in the
words of the text, that "God is not the God of the dead, but of the
living."

I would wish to unfold a little what is contained in these words,
which we often hear even, perhaps, without quite understanding them;
and many times oftener without fully entering into them. And we may
take them, first, in their first part, where they say that "God is
not the God of the dead."

The word "dead," we know, is constantly used in Scripture in a
double sense, as meaning those who are dead spiritually, as well as
those who are dead naturally. And, in either sense, the words are
alike applicable: "God is not the God of the dead."

God's not being the God of the dead signifies two things: that they
who are without him are dead, as well as that they who are dead are
also without him. So far as our knowledge goes respecting inferior
animals, they appear to be examples of this truth. They appear to
us to have no knowledge of God; and we are not told that they have
any other life than the short one of which our senses inform us. I
am well aware that our ignorance of their condition is so great that
we may not dare to say anything of them positively; there may be a
hundred things true respecting them which we neither know nor
imagine. I would only say that, according to that most imperfect
light in which we see them, the two points of which I have been
speaking appear to meet in them: we believe that they have no
consciousness of God, and we believe that they will die. And so
far, therefore, they afford an example of the agreement, if I may so
speak, between these two points; and were intended, perhaps, to be
to our view a continual image of it. But we had far better speak of
ourselves. And here, too, it is the case that "God is not the God
of the dead." If we are without him we are dead; and if we are dead
we are without him: in other words, the two ideas of death and
absence f