“The resurrection of the body,” i.e., on the last day (Matt. 24:29; Luke 21:25).  When on the last day, at the general judgment, God’s angel sounds the great trumpet, all the dead will arise again and come to judgment, in the same bodies they had while living.  But you will say:  If their bodies are reduced to ashes and mixed with the earth, or if parts of them are in one place and parts in another, how is this possible?  Very easily, with God.  If He in the beginning could make all the parts out of nothing, with how much ease can He collect them scattered here and there!  When God made man He gave him a body and a soul, and wished them never to be separated.  Man was to live here upon earth for a time, and then be taken up into Heaven, body and soul, as Our Lord is there now.  But when man sinned, in punishment God commanded that he should die; i.e., that these two dear friends, the body and the soul, should be separated for a time.  Death is caused by the separation of the soul from the body.  The body and soul together make a man, and neither one alone can be called a man.  A dead body is only part of a man.  At the resurrection every soul will come from Heaven, Purgatory, or Hell, to seek its own body; they will then be united again as they were in life, never to be separated—­to be happy together in Heaven if they have been good upon earth, or miserable together in Hell if they have been bad upon earth.

“Life everlasting”—­either, as we have said, in Heaven or Hell.  There was a time when we did not exist but it can never be said of us again we do not exist.  When once we have been created, we shall live as long as God Himself, i.e., forever.  When we have lived a thousand years for every drop of water in the ocean; a thousand years for every grain of sand on the seashore; a thousand years for every blade of grass and every leaf on the earth, we shall still be existing.  How short a time, therefore, is a hundred years even if we live so long—­and few do—­compared with all these millions of years!  And yet it depends upon the time we live here whether all these millions of years in the next world will be for us years of happiness or of misery.  The whole life of a man extends through the two worlds, viz., from the moment of his creation through all eternity; and surely the little while he stays upon earth must seem very short when, after spending a million of years in the next world, he looks back to his earthly life.  There is a good example to illustrate this.  If you stand on a railroad, and look away down the track for about a mile, it will seem to you that the rails come nearer and nearer, till at last they touch.  It seems so on account of the distance, for where they seem to touch they are just as far apart as where you are standing.  So, also, when you look back from eternity, the day of your birth and the day of your death will seem to coincide, and your life on earth appear nothing.  Then, if you are among the lost souls you will think, What a fool I was to make myself suffer all this long eternity for that silly bit of earthly pleasure, which is of no benefit to me now!  And this thought will serve only to make you more miserable.  But, on the other hand, if you look back from a happy eternity, you will wonder at God’s goodness in giving you so much happiness for so short a service upon earth.