Thoughts of the Spiritual

it not the God of the dead, but of the living."?Matt. xxii. 31 and 32. St Matthew, in commenting upon the utterance of the Saviour as embodied in the second of the above passages, states ?" the multitude were astonished at His doctrine." That fact, in view of the ordinary interpretation given to these words of Jesus, is in itself astonishing. "Were astonished"!?but at what? If His words constitute, as we have been so often assured they do, an argument for the resuscitation of the dead physical bodies of the Departed on some future day, why were the Jews astonished at what He said ? He was, it is true, speaking directly tothose who denied the fact of spirit and of life after death ? the materialistic Sadducees; but the greater part of that crowd listening to Him believed in a future resurrection. They held the idea that the earthly body, which is disintegrated in the grave, and whose constituent particles are requisitioned for the building up of other physical bodies, will some day be restored to a particular one of the beings or material objects that have held a temporary proprietorship of it. It never seemed to strike them, that inasmuch as the particles composing the physical body of any person are constantly changing, and becoming the particles of the body of someone, or something, else, it would be impossible to assign a final proprietorship of them to one person without depriving others of the same right. They believed?did those Jews ? that physical...