Excerpt from The Spiritual Body: An Essay in Prose and Verse

If we accept the immortality of the soul, we are logically bound to accept also the immortality of the body under altered conditions. The very name Of spirit includes the idea of body, for What is the pneuma which we breathe and on which all the phe nomena of life, animal and vegetable, depend IS it not a body, though an invisible one? Is it not as much a body as the hardest rock? Does it not con stitute the Chief part of our nourishment and of the food we eat exclusive of the air we inhale Let us not be the slaves Of words without ideas. If our pneuma is to survive death, it can do so in no other way than that which the Scripture points out - by retaining its pneumatic, or Spiritual, body. And let those who are inclined to censure or ridicule this View of the subject remember that whatever weapon strikes the spiritual body stabs also the immortality of the soul. If we dote and dream in expecting the one, we dote and dream no less in looking for the other. How can the communion of saints be realised if we dis credit the spiritual body? What relations can we have with a spirit who is now/lore and nobody And of what avail would it be to invoke those who cannot hear, and have no organism by which to receive im pressions from without A spirit without a body would be the counterpart of Undine, a body without a soul.

Both belong to the region of romance. The moment you localise a spirit you endow that spirit with a spiritual body. Place implies form whatever occupies the one is possessed of the other. We Shall find ourselves after death, as before, in a locality., We need no miracle for the change. Our resurrection will not be miracu lous in the ordinary sense any more than our birth was, but, on the contrary, perfectly natural, Simple, and easy. The great iron gate will open before us, angel-led, of its own accord. We shall pass, and not for the first time, from death unto life, and, though the change will be wonderful, it will not be more wonderful than preceding steps which we have taken in the march of existence. We have a type of it in our awaking at dawn; and this figure is the more exact when we remember that we do not awake and rise in the same body as that in which we lay down. It is the same in one sense but not in another. It is the same by continuity, but it is not the same by absolute physical identity. Every part Of it has undergone a change. Brain tissue espe cially is repaired, to be wasted again during the day with every thought we think and every sensation we feel.

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