ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1845, by

GEORGE BUSH,

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of

THE substance of the ensuing Essay was originally delivered as a Lecture, prepared as an answer to some severe strictures made in one of the pulpits of the city on that part of my work on the Resurrection, which treats of this subject. This fact will account for the air of reply and remonstrance, which more or less pervades the volume. In its present form the argument has been much expanded, and the sources of evidence multiplied.

THE RESURRECTION OF CHRIST.

WITH no true believer in the Revelation which God has given, can it be for a moment questioned that the doctrine of the Resurrection stands prominent and preeminent among the disclosures of that sacred volume. The dark guessings of the ancient philosophies-the dim intimations-the uncertain hopes-the timorous deductions of the universal reason-that man, in his essential being, shall survive the triumphs of the tomb, and possess immortal life, are all confirmed, authenticated, and assured to his faith, by the teachings of Him, who "hath brought life and immortality to light." Upon the impregnable rock of the same authority standз the asserted fact of the resurrection of Christ himself, who rose 66 as the first fruits of them that slept." The fact of our resurrection is indissolubly connected with that of his, with only those differences which must necessarily accrue, in the nature of the case, from the difference that separates man from the God-man. The great mystery of godliness-"God manifest in the flesh"-the true constitution of the theanthropic person of Christ, we assume not to fathom. We receive it as an ultimate fact, resting upon the sole authority of the inspired word, that in the economy of redemption, the

1

1

Divinity came into union with the humanity, and tabernacled in the flesh. We receive it, also, that this Divine Person died on the cross, so far as he could die, and that he rose from the dead as truly as he died. So far we are occupying ground common to all evangelical Christians. With them, also, we fully agree in the importance of this fact, as the great central truth of Christianity, and the demonstrated pledge of the doctrine of the resurrection of the saints. The return to life on the third day of the august Lord of life, ever has been, and ever is to be, the assured seal and earnest of the living again of those who have slept in Jesus. But how far the resurrection of Christ is to be regarded as an exact pattern of the resurrection of the saints, can only be determined by determining how far, from the nature of each, the conditions of the one could find a parallel in those of the other. It is certain that the body of Christ did not "see corruption." It is certain that the bodies of the saints do see corruption. This establishes at once an immeasurable diversity, in this respect, between the two. In the one case, a body is made the subject of a change called resurrection, while its organic integrity remains unimpaired; in the other, if the common view be admitted, bodies which have been dissolved, dissipated, and formed into countless new combinations, are to be reconstructed, and vivified anew by their respective souls or spirits, and thus made to live again as the identical bodies which died. If this be not the commonly received view, we would gladly be informed what it is.

Again, it is clear that the divino-human constitution of our Lord's person must be the ground of an immense difference in the conditions of his state and that of his