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| No Mere Metaphor in the Phrase Resurrection of the Dead. In Proportion to the Importance of Eternal Truths, is the Clearness of Their Scriptural Enunciation. PREVIOUS SECTION - NEXT SECTION - HELP
Chapter XXI.—No
Mere Metaphor in the Phrase Resurrection of the Dead. In Proportion to
the Importance of Eternal Truths, is the Clearness of Their Scriptural
Enunciation.
Well, if it occurs occasionally in certain
portions of it, you will say, then why not in that phrase,7410
7410 Resurrectio
Mortuorum, of which we have been speaking. | where the resurrection might be spiritually
understood? There are several reasons why not. First, what must be the
meaning of so many important passages of Holy Scripture, which so
obviously attest the resurrection of the body, as to admit not even the
appearance of a figurative signification? And, indeed, (since some
passages are more obscure than others), it cannot but be right—as
we have shown above7411 —that
uncertain statements should be determined by certain ones, and obscure
ones by such as are clear and plain; else there is fear that, in the
conflict of certainties and uncertainties, of explicitness and
obscurity, faith may be shattered, truth endangered, and the Divine
Being Himself be branded as inconstant. Then arises the improbability
that the very mystery on which our trust wholly rests, on which also
our instruction entirely depends, should have the appearance of being
ambiguously announced and obscurely propounded, inasmuch as the hope of
the resurrection, unless it be clearly set forth on the sides both of
punishment and reward, would fail to persuade any to embrace a religion
like ours, exposed as it is to public detestation and the imputation of
hostility to others. There is no certain work where the remuneration is
uncertain. There is no real apprehension when the peril is only
doubtful. But both the recompense of reward, and the danger of losing
it, depend on the issues of the resurrection. Now, if even those
purposes of God against cities, and nations, and kings, which are
merely temporal, local, and personal in their character, have been
proclaimed so clearly in prophecy, how is it to be supposed that those
dispensations of His which are eternal, and of universal concern to the
human race, should be void of all real light in themselves? The grander
they are, the clearer should be their announcement, in order that their
superior greatness might be believed. And I apprehend that God cannot
possibly have ascribed to Him either envy, or guile, or inconsistency,
or artifice, by help of which evil qualities it is that all schemes of
unusual grandeur are litigiously promulgated.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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