Standing upon an elevated point near the summit, and looking down those acres of hillocks to where the busy laborers are engaged in putting bodies into the ground, covering them with earth, and rounding the soil over them, one is perhaps struck for the first time with the full force, meaning, and beauty of the language of Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians:—­“That which thou sowest is not that body which shall be, but bare grain.  It [the human body] is sown in corruption, is sown in dishonor, is sown in weakness.  It is sown a natural body; it is raised [or springs up, to complete the figure] a spiritual body.  Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of heaven.”—­I once heard a distinguished botanist dispute the accuracy of this simile, inasmuch, he said, as the seed, when it is sown in the ground, does not die, but in fact then first begins to live and to display the vital force which was previously asleep in it; while the human body decays and is resolved into its primitive gaseous, mineral, and vegetable elements, the particles of which, disseminated everywhere, and transferred through chemical affinities into other and new organisms, lose all traces of their former connection.—­In answer to such a finical criticism as this, intended to invalidate the authority of the great Apostolic Theologian, I replied, that Paul was not an inspired botanist,—­in fact, that he probably knew nothing whatever about botany as a science,—­but an inspired religious teacher, who employed the language of his people and the measure of knowledge to which his age had attained, to expound to his contemporaries the principles of his Master’s religion.  I am not familiar with the nicer points of strict theological orthodoxy, but, from modern sermons and commentaries, I should infer that few doctors of even the most straitest school of divinity hold to the doctrine of verbal inspiration.  That the Prophets and Apostles were acquainted with botany, chemistry, geology, or any other modern science, is a notion as unfounded in truth as it is hostile and foreign to the object and purpose of Revelation, which is strictly confined to religion and ethics.  Those persons, therefore, (and they are a numerous class,) who resort to the Bible, assuming that it professes to be an inspired manual of universal knowledge, and then, because they find in its figurative Oriental phraseology, or in its metaphors and illustrations, some inaccuracies of expression or misstatements of scientific facts, would throw discredit upon the essential religious dogmas and doctrines which it is its object to state and unfold, are, to say the least, extremely disingenuous, if not deficient in understanding.