Scripture Difficulties Sermons Preached Before the University of Cambridge Including the Hulsean Lectures for 1854 And 3 Other Sermons - neues Buch

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: LECTURE III. 1 CORINTHIANS XV. 35. How are the dead raised up ? and with ivhat body do they come ? THE question that next presents itself to the enquirer, about the Scriptural notion of the reviviscence of the human being, is that of identity. We have endeavoured to recapitulate, from sources trustworthy and impartial, what was the idea of a future life before our Saviour brought it to light or made it clear, the progress of the doctrine of the resurrection after the time of the Gospel, and to shew what is the difference between the raised body and the present natural body; and we have now to consider how far the changes we have described as taking place in the body are consistent with sameness of the individual. In speaking of identity, or sameness, we are met at once with a notion of the extreme vagueness of the term; we are forced to make certain distinctions between the cases to which we apply the word. Even mathematical identity is twofold; figures of the same form coincide geometrically and are identical; in certain algebraic formulae the form is different, the real value of expressions the same; here the identity is deductive. And in the physical world, when neitherform nor real substance are wholly the same, we yet do not scruple to speak of the sameness of objects; and the instance which has been made use of most frequently to illustrate this is taken from vegetable growth. The tree which year by year sheds all its leaves, and is renewed throughout its whole structure with its acquired annual increase, we do not hesitate to talk of as the same tree; we do not require, in order to constitute sameness, the actual existence of the same particles only, and in the same relative positions; and when in old age all the interior substance may be decayed and gone, ...