THE K I N G ’S B U S I N E S S 329 mg of Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit must come in; otherwise the devil may come again and be as much at home as ever. "Where is the evidence that the true child of God may be demon-possessed? Is the Holy Spirit cast out by the emissaries of Satan? That there is such a thing as demon influence upon the Christian we are prepared to admit, but demon possession we do hot find Scripture warrant for accepting. K. L. B = 7 Zs&r i&Sr . DOES DEATH PERMANENTLY SEVER SOUL AND BODY? Quite frequently we hear Christians referring to the body as a prison- house of the spirit from which it will be a great boon to be freed. Ministers sometimes speak of man’s body as related to the spirit only as a casket to a precious jewel, or the walls of his dungeon to the prisoner. Have -not these ideas helped along some of the erroneous teachings regarding the resurrection? The bodily resurrection of Christ has been spiritualized away as being unnecessary. The resurrection of the saints, according to one of our up-tp-date scholars, is. ‘ ‘ not an event-that will take place at the end of the age, but something coincident with the transition of the soul at death.” If,this is true, resurrection has nothing to do with the body, indeed, there is no resurrection day coming. The Bible is all wrong. The Lord will not descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and the trump of God, and the dead in Christ will not rise first (1 Thess. 4:16) . God will "not in that day give to every seed his own body (1 Cor. 15:38), All that are in the graves will not come forth (Jno. 5:28, 29). But many Christians are not willing to be led into such a predicament with ' the Word of God. This, however, is the only logical conclusion if the spirit is forever unclothed from the body at the moment of death. Many are overlooking the sacredness of the body. We like the words of Canon Liddon and commend them to our readers: “ The personal spirit of man strikes its roots far and deep into the encompass ing frame of sense, with which, from the first moment of its existence, it has been so intimately associated; in a thousand ways, and most powerfully the body acts on the soul, and the soul on the body. They are only parted at death by a power ful wrench. The spirit can exist independently of the body, but this independent existence is not its emancipation from a prison-house of matter and sense; it is a temporary and abnormal divorce from the companion whose presence is needed to complete its life. Would the soul, permanently severed from the body, still be, properly speaking, a man? Would it not really be some other being? Our ' inward consciousness here echoes the answer of science. The body which has been so long the associate and partner of the soul’s life, the instrument of its will, the minister of its passions, mingling lower physical sensations with that higher life of thought and feeling which belongs to it, could not be altogether cast away without impairing the completeness of our being, without imperilling the continuous identity of ouy changeful existence. “ In this life the body and soul together form ong composite being; each acts upon the other as well as with it. The corruptible body presseth down the soul. The passions, which have their seat in the soul, depict themselves upon the sur face of the body. On the one hand, an Apostle reminds us that fleshly lusts war against the soul. On the other hand, a beautiful soul illuminates the face of a St. Stephen with angelic Light; and hereafter the bodies of the blessed will be ‘glorious,’ that is to say, translucent with the splendors of the glorified spirit.”
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