is made of the bodies of other men. In these and the like
cases, wherein one man's body is supposed to be turned into the
substance of another man's body, how should both these at the
resurrection each recover his own body? So that this objection is like
that of the Sadducees to our Savior, concerning a woman that had seven
husbands: they ask, "whose wife of the seven shall she be at the
resurrection?" So here, when several have had the same body, whose
shall it be at the resurrection? and how shall they be supplied that
have it not?

This is the objection; and in order to the answering of it, I shall
premise these two things:

1. That the body of man is not a constant and permanent thing, always
continuing in the same state, and consisting of the same matter; but
a successive thing, which is continually spending and continually
renewing itself, every day losing something of the matter which it had
before, and gaining new; so that most men have new bodies oftener than
they have new clothes; only with this difference, that we change our
clothes commonly at once, but our bodies by degrees.

And this is undeniably certain from experience. For so much as our
bodies grow, so much new matter is added to them, over and beside the
repairing of what is continually spent; and after a man come to his
full growth, so much of his food as every day turns into nourishment,
so much of his yesterday's body is usually wasted, and carried off by
insensible perspiration--that is, breathed out at the pores of his
body; which, according to the static experiment of Sanctorius, a
learned physician, who, for several years together, weighed himself
exactly every day, is (as I remember) according to the proportion of
five to eight of all that a man eats and drinks. Now, according to
this proportion, every man must change his body several times in a
year.

It is true indeed the more solid parts of the body, as the bones, do
not change so often as the fluid and fleshy; but that they also do
change is certain, because they grow, and whatever grows is nourished
and spends, because otherwise it would not need to be repaired.

2. The body which a man hath at any time of his life is as much his
own body as that which he hath at his death; so that if the very
matter of his body which a man had at any time of his life be raised,
it is as much his own and the same body as that which he had at
his death, and commonly much more perfect; because they w