miracle of these being transfigured till they shine ’so as no fuller on earth could white them.’  The living will witness the resurrection of the dead; the risen dead will witness the transformation of the living.  Then both hosts will be united, and, through all eternity, ‘live together,’ and that ‘with Him.’  Paul evidently expects that he and the Corinthians will be in the latter class, as appears by the ‘we’ in verse 52.  He, as it were, points to his own body when he says, recurring to his former thought of the necessity of harmony between organism and environment, ’this corruptible must put on incorruption.’  Here ‘corruption’ is used in its physical application, though the ethical meaning may be in the background.

The Apostle closes his long argument and revelation with a burst, almost a shout, of triumph.  Glowing words of old prophets rush into his mind, and he breathes a new, grander meaning into them.  Isaiah had sung of a time when the veil over all nations should be destroyed ‘in this mountain,’ and when death should be swallowed up for ever; and Paul grasps the words and says that the prophet’s loftiest anticipations will be fulfilled when that monster, whose insatiable maw swallows down youth, beauty, strength, wisdom, will himself be swallowed up.  Hosea had prophesied of Israel’s restoration under figure of a resurrection, and Paul grasps his words and fills them with a larger meaning.  He modifies them, in a manner on which we need not enlarge, to express the great Christian thought that death has conquered man but that man in Christ will conquer the conqueror.  With swift change of metaphor he represents death as a serpent, armed with a poisoned sting, and that suggests to him the thought, never far away in his view of man, that death’s power to slay is derived from—­or, so to say, concentrated in—­sin; and that at once raises the other equally characteristic and familiar thought that law stimulates sin, since to know a thing to be forbidden creates in perverse humanity an itching to do it, and law reveals sin by setting up the ideal from which sin is the departure.  But just as the tracks in Paul’s mind were well worn, by which the thought of death brought in that of sin, and that of sin drew after it that of law, so with equal closeness of established association, that of law condemnatory and slaying, brought up that of Christ the all-sufficient refuge from that gloomy triad—­Death Sin, Law.  Through union with Him each of us may possess His immortal risen life, in which Death, the engulfer, is himself engulfed; Death, the conqueror, is conquered utterly and for ever; Death, the serpent, has his sting drawn, and is harmless.  That participation in Christ’s life is begun even here, and God ’giveth us the victory’ now, even while we live outward lives that must end in death, and will give it perfectly in the resurrection, when ’they cannot die any more,’ and death itself is dead.