Anastasis Author:George Bush 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: are required to believe that there is a discrimination to be made between these particles, now become homogeneous, and that a latent virtue in some which does no... more »t pertain to the others, is to appropriate them to the formation of a body " fashioned like unto Christ's glorious body." Can we conceive it ? If it be said in reply, that the true question is, not whether we can conceive it, but whether inspiration has affirmed it, our rejoinder to this will be found in the sequel, where we consider the scriptural argument. CHAPTER II. Distinction of Personal and Bodily Identity. The position that the scriptural doctrine of the resurrection necessitates the belief of the resurrection of the same body, enforces upon us the consideration of the subject of identity. We are at once arrested by the inquiry, whether the identity of the person implies the identity of the body. In strictness of speech a body which is undergoing a constant change in its constituent particles cannot be said to be the same in any two successive moments of its duration. This of course applies to the human body, the component atoms of which are in a state of ceaseless fluctuation. A precise use of language will not warrant the assertion, that our bodies are the same this hour that they were the last. The paring of a nail, the clipping of a hair, leaves the body a different body from what it was before this subduction from its integrity took place. It is true indeed that for all the purposes of ordinary and popular discourse it is perhaps an unexceptionable mode of diction to say, that we have in mature life the same bodies that we had in childhood. But when we subject the phraseology to a rigid test,it is obvious that it cannot be true. That cannot be the same through a given lapse of time which is constantly c...« less