in a glorified state, no doubt lived and glowed in his memory after his return to earth, and made him think of the resurrection as the event, in his personal history, to which every thing else was subordinate.  He shows the interest which he felt in this event, when, writing to the Romans, he says, “And not only they,”—­that is, “the creatures,” or creation,—­“but ourselves, also, which have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption, of our body.”  In his address, at Jerusalem, before his accusers and the people, he cried out, “Of the hope and resurrection of the dead I am called in question.”  It was uniformly a prominent topic of his thoughts.

It is by no means impossible, nor improbable, judging from analogy, that there may be, in the human soul, faculties which are slumbering, until a glorified body assists in their development.  Persons born blind have the dormant faculty of seeing; the gift of the eye would bring it into exercise.  So of the other senses, and their related mental faculties.  With a glorified body, then, truly it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but the thought itself is rapture, that our souls at present may be as disproportioned to their future expansion, as the acorn is to the oak of a century’s growth, which is infolded now, and dormant, in the seed.

The addition of a body to the glorified spirit will, therefore, be a help, and not an encumbrance.  For we are not to suppose that the soul, after having been for centuries in a state superior to its present condition, would retrograde, in returning to the body.  A common idea respecting a body is, that it is necessarily a clog.  True, by reason of sin and its effects, it is now a “vile body;” and Paul speaks of it as “the body of this death.”  But, even while we are in this world, a body is an indispensable help to the soul.  The disembodied spirit, probably, is not capable of sustaining a full, active relation to a world of matter; a material form is necessary to make its powers serviceable here.  This being so, there is certainly reason, from analogy, to suppose that the addition of a spiritual body to the glorified soul will not necessarily work any deterioration to the spirit.  At all events, we cannot suppose that the bliss of heaven will be suffered to diminish, by remanding the emancipated spirit into connection with any thing which will subtract from the state to which it will have arrived.  There is a law of progress in the divine government, by which the intelligent universe will be forever advancing.  We are to be changed “from glory to glory;” not from a greater glory to a less, but into the same image with Christ.