life from Him, which gradually conquers the death of sin now, and will triumph over bodily death in the final resurrection.  It is the resurrection of Christians that Paul is dealing with.  Others are to be raised, but on a different principle, and to sadly different issues.  Since Christ’s Resurrection assures us of the future waking, it changes death into ‘sleep,’ and that sleep does not mean unconsciousness any more than natural sleep does, but only rest from toil, and cessation of intercourse with the external world.

In the part of the passage, verses 50 to 58, the Apostle becomes, not the witness or the reasoner, as in the earlier parts of the chapter, but the revealer of a ‘mystery.’  That word, so tragically misunderstood, has here its uniform scriptural sense of truth, otherwise unknown, made known by revelation.  But before he unveils the mystery, Paul states with the utmost force a difficulty which might seem to crush all hope,—­namely, that corporeity, as we know it, is clearly incapable of living in such a world as that future one must be.  To use modern terms, organism and environment must be adapted to each other.  A fish must have the water, the creatures that flourish at the poles would not survive at the equator.  A man with his gross earthly body, so thoroughly adapted to his earthly abode, would be all out of harmony with his surroundings in that higher world, and its rarified air would be too thin and pure for his lungs.  Can there be any possibility of making him fit to live in a spiritual world?  Apart from revelation, the dreary answer must be ‘No.’  But the ‘mystery’ answers with ‘Yes.’  The change from physical to spiritual is clearly necessary, if there is to be a blessed life hereafter.

That necessary change is assured to all Christians, whether they die or ‘remain till the coming of the Lord.’  Paul varies in his anticipations as to whether he and his contemporaries will belong to the one class or the other; but he is quite sure that in either case the indwelling Spirit of Jesus will effect on living and dead the needful change.  The grand description in verse 52, like the parallel in 1 Thessalonians iv. 16, is modelled on the account of the theophany on Sinai.  The trumpet was the signal of the Divine Presence.  That last manifestation will be sudden, and its startling breaking in on daily commonplace is intensified by the reduplication:  ‘In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye.’  With sudden crash that awful blare of ‘loud, uplifted angel trumpet’ will silence all other sounds, and hush the world.  The stages of what follows are distinctly marked.  First, the rising of the dead changed in passing through death, so as to rise in incorruptible bodies, and then the change of the bodies of the living into like incorruption.  The former will not be found naked, but will be clothed with their white garments; the latter will, as it were, put on the glorious robes above the ‘muddy vesture of decay,’ or, more truly, will see the