Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OURSELVES IN RELATION TO THOSE BEHIND THE VEIL " The communion of saints."—Apostles' Creed. "As touching the resurrection (Greek dxdorao-u, i.e. the ad- vancement) of ' the dead,' have ye not read that which was spoken to you by God, saying—' I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob' ? God it not the God of the dead, but of the living."—Matt. xxii. 31 and 32. St Matthew, in commenting upon the utterance of the Saviour as embodied in the second of the above passages, states —" the multitude were astonished at His doctrine." That fact, in view of the ordinary interpretation given to these words of Jesus, is in itself astonishing. "Were astonished"!—but at what? If His words constitute, as we have been so often assured they do, an argument for the resuscitation of the dead physical bodies of the Departed on some future day, why were the Jews astonished at what He said ? He was, it is true, speaking directly tothose who denied the fact of spirit and of life after death — the materialistic Sadducees; but the greater part of that crowd listening to Him believed in a future resurrection. They held the idea that the earthly body, which is disintegrated in the grave, and whose constituent particles are requisitioned for the building up of other physical bodies, will some day be restored to a particular one of the beings or material objects that have held a temporary proprietorship of it. It never seemed to strike them, that inasmuch as the particles composing the physical body of any person are constantly changing, and becoming the particles of the body of someone, or something, else, it would be impossible to assign a final proprietorship of them to one person without depriving others of the same right. They believed—did those Jews — that physical...