Ib. p. 110.

You will say nevertheless, that even the wicked will be raised incorruptible to inherit incorruption, because being once raised, their bodies will no more change or be dissolved, but must continue entire, for ever united with their sad and miserable souls.  Well, and would you call this corruption or incorruptibility?  Certainly this is not the sense of the Apostle, when he formally assures us, yea, even threatens us, that corruption cannot inherit incorruption.  ’Neither doth corruption inherit incorruption’.  What then may this singular expression mean?  This is what it manifestly means;—­that no person, whoever he may be, without any exception, who possesseth a corrupt heart and corrupt actions, and therein persevereth unto death, shall have reason to expect in the resurrection a pure, subtile, active and impassible body.

This is actually dangerous tampering with the written letter.

Without touching on the question whether St. Paul in this celebrated chapter (1 ‘Cor’. xv.) speaks of a partial or of the general resurrection, or even conceding to Lacunza that the former opinion is the more probable; I must still vehemently object to this Jesuitical interpretation of corruption, as used in a moral sense, and distinctive of the wicked souls.  St. Paul nowhere speaks dogmatically or preceptively (not popularly and incidentally,) of a soul as the proper ‘I’.  It is always ‘we’, or the man.  How could a regenerate saint put off corruption at the sound of the trump, if up to that hour it did not in some sense or other appertain to him?  But what need of many words?  It flashes on every reader whose imagination supplies an unpreoccupied, unrefracting, ‘medium’ to the Apostolic assertion, that corruption in this passage is a descriptive synonyme of the material sensuous organism common to saint and sinner,—­standing in precisely the same relation to the man that the testaceous offensive and defensive armour does to the crab and tortoise.  These slightly combined and easily decomponible stuffs are as incapable of subsisting under the altered conditions of the earth as an hydatid in the blaze of a tropical sun.  They would be no longer ‘media’ of communion between the man and his circumstances.

A heavy difficulty presses, as it appears to me, on Lacunza’s system, as soon as we come to consider the general resurrection.  Our Lord (in books of indubitable and never doubted catholicity) speaks of some who rise to bliss and glory, others who at the same time rise to shame and condemnation.  Now if the former class live not during the whole interval from their death to the general resurrection, including the Millennium, or ’Dies Messiae’,—­how should they, whose imperfect or insufficient merits excluded them from the kingdom of the Messiah on earth, be all at once fitted for the kingdom of heaven?

Ib. ch. vii. p. 118.