A soul is not a human being; a human being is a composite of soul and body.  It is interesting to note that people who do not believe in the resurrection of our Lord, do not believe in our survival as human beings, consequently do not believe in a heaven that is of any human interest.  But we feel, do we not? a certain lack of interest in a future in which we shall be something quite different in constitution from what we are now.  We can think of a time between death and the resurrection in which we shall be incomplete, but that is tolerable because it is disciplinary and temporary and looks on to our restitution to full humanity in the resurrection at the Last Day.  And we feel that the promise, the certainty of this is sealed by our Lord’s resurrection from the dead.  We are certain that that took place because it is needful to the completion of His Work.

The Creed is one:  and if one denies one article one speedily finds that there is an effect on others.  The denial of the resurrection is part and parcel of the attempt to reduce Christianity to a history of something that once took place which is important to us to-day because it affords us a standard of life, a pattern after which we are to shape ourselves.  Else should we be very much in the dark.  We gain from the Christian Revelation a conception of God as a kindly Father Who desires His children to follow the example of His Son.  That example, no doubt, must not be pressed too literally, must be adapted to modern conditions; but we can get some light and guidance from the study of it.  Still, if you do not care to follow it nothing will happen to you.  It is merely a pleasing occupation for those who are interested in such things.  The affirmation of the resurrection, on the other hand, is the affirmation of the continuity of the work of God Incarnate; it is an assertion that Christianity is a supernatural action of God going on all the time, the essence of which is, not that it invites the believer to imitation of the life of Christ, so far as seems practical under modern conditions, but that it calls him to union with Christ; it makes it his life’s meaning to recreate the Christ-experience, to be born and live and die through the experience of Incarnate God.  It fixes his attention not on what Jesus did but on what Jesus is.  It insists on a present vital organic relation to God, mediated by the humanity of Jesus; and if there be no humanity of Jesus, if at His death He ceased to be completely human, then there is no possibility of such a relation to God in Christ as the Catholic Religion has from the beginning postulated; and unless we are to continue human there seems no continuing basis for such a relation to one another in the future as would make the future of any interest to us.  For us, as for S. Paul, all our hope hangs on the resurrection of Christ from the dead; and if Christ be not risen from the dead then is our faith vain.