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| Chapter XLVIII.
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Chapter
XLVIII.
Come now, if some philosopher affirms, as Laberius holds, following an opinion of
Pythagoras, that a man may have his origin from a mule, a serpent from
a woman, and with skill of speech twists every argument to prove his
view, will he not gain acceptance for and work in some the conviction
that, on account of this, they should even abstain from eating animal
food? May any one have the persuasion that he should so abstain, lest
by chance in his beef he eats of some ancestor of his? But if a
Christian promises the return of a man from a man, and the very actual
Gaius from Gaius,148
| 148 [i.e.,
Caius, used (like John Doe with us) in Roman Law.] | the cry of the people
will be to have him stoned; they will not even so much as grant him a
hearing. If there is any ground for the moving to and fro of human
souls into different bodies, why may they not return into the very
substance they have left, seeing this is to be restored, to be that
which had been? They are no longer the very things they had been;
for they could not be what they were not, without first ceasing to be
what they had been. If we were inclined to give all rein upon this
point, discussing into what various beasts one and another might
probably be changed, we would need at our leisure to take up many
points. But this we would do chiefly in our own defence, as setting
forth what is greatly worthier of belief, that a man will come back
from a man—any given person from any given person, still
retaining his humanity; so that the soul, with its qualities unchanged,
may be restored to the same condition, thought not to the same outward
framework. Assuredly, as the reason why restoration takes place at all
is the appointed judgment, every man must needs come forth the very
same who had once existed, that he may receive at God’s hands a
judgment, whether of good desert or the opposite. And therefore the
body too will appear; for the soul is not capable of suffering without
the solid substance (that is, the flesh; and for this reason, also)
that it is not right that souls should have all the wrath of God to
bear: they did not sin without the body, within which all was done by
them. But how, you say, can a substance which has been dissolved be
made to reappear again? Consider thyself, O man, and thou wilt
believe in it! Reflect on what you were before you came into existence.
Nothing. For if you had been anything, you would have remembered it.
You, then, who were nothing before you existed, reduced to nothing also
when you cease to be, why may you not come into being again out of
nothing, at the will of the same Creator whose will created you out of
nothing at the first? Will it be anything new in your case? You who
were not, were made; when you cease to be again, you
shall be made. Explain, if you can, your original creation, and
then demand to know how you shall be re-created. Indeed, it will be
still easier surely to make you what you were once, when the very same
creative power made you without difficulty what you never were before.
There will be doubts, perhaps, as to the power of God, of Him who hung
in its place this huge body of our world, made out of what had never
existed, as from a death of emptiness and inanity, animated by the
Spirit who quickens all living things, its very self the unmistakable
type of the resurrection, that it might be to you a witness—nay,
the exact image of the resurrection. Light, every day
extinguished, shines out again; and, with like alternation, darkness
succeeds light’s outgoing. The defunct stars re-live; the
seasons, as soon as they are finished, renew their course; the fruits
are brought to maturity, and then are reproduced. The seeds do not
spring up with abundant produce, save as they rot and dissolve
away;—all things are preserved by perishing, all things are
refashioned out of death. Thou, man of nature so exalted, if thou
understandest thyself, taught even by the Pythian149
| 149 Know thyself. [Juvenal,
xi. 27, on which see great wealth of reference in J.E.B. Mayor’s
Juvenal (xiii. Satires), and note
especially, Bernard, Serm. De Divers xl. 3. In Cant.
Cantic. xxxvi. 5–7.] |
words, lord of all these things that die and rise,—shalt thou die
to perish evermore? Wherever your dissolution shall have taken place,
whatever material agent has destroyed you, or swallowed you up, or
swept you away, or reduced you to nothingness, it shall again restore
you. Even nothingness is His who is Lord of all. You ask, Shall
we then be always dying, and rising up from death? If so the Lord of
all things had appointed, you would have to submit, though unwillingly,
to the law of your creation. But, in fact, He has no other purpose than
that of which He has informed us. The Reason which made the universe
out of diverse elements, so that all things might be composed of
opposite substances in unity—of void and solid, of animate and
inanimate, of comprehensible and incomprehensible, of light and
darkness, of life itself and death—has also disposed time into
order, by fixing and distinguishing its mode, according to which this
first portion of it, which we inhabit from the beginning of the world,
flows down by a temporal course to a close; but the portion which
succeeds, and to which we look forward continues forever. When,
therefore, the boundary and limit, that millennial interspace,
has been passed, when even the outward fashion of the world
itself—which has been spread like a veil over the eternal
economy, equally a thing of time—passes away, then the whole
human race shall be raised again, to have its dues meted out according
as it has merited in the period of good or evil, and thereafter to have
these paid out through the immeasurable ages of eternity. Therefore
after this there is neither death nor repeated resurrections, but we
shall be the same that we are now, and still unchanged—the
servants of God, ever with God, clothed upon with the proper substance
of eternity; but the profane, and all who are not true worshippers of
God, in like manner shall be consigned to the punishment of everlasting
fire—that fire which, from its very nature indeed, directly
ministers to their incorruptibility. The philosophers are familiar as
well as we with the distinction between a common and a secret fire.
Thus that which is in common use is far different from that which we
see in divine judgments, whether striking as thunderbolts from heaven,
or bursting up out of the earth through mountain-tops; for it does not
consume what it scorches, but while it burns it repairs. So the
mountains continue ever burning; and a person struck by lighting is
even now kept safe from any destroying flame. A notable proof this of
the fire eternal! a notable example of the endless judgment which still
supplies punishment with fuel! The mountains burn, and last. How will
it be with the wicked and the enemies of God?150
| 150 [Our author’s
philosophy may be at fault, but his testimony is not to be
mistaken.] | E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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