Mrs. H. B. Stowe on the Resurrection by Dudley Marvin Canright

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 3, 1872

Mrs. H. B. Stowe on the Resurrection.

By Dudley Marvin Canright

The following article from this celebrated authoress is certainly worth reading. She but expresses the real feeling of every heart when she says, “A pure spirit, abstract, distant, will never content me; it will not be my friend.” This shows the hollowness and worthlessness of that miserable theory that makes us in the world to come simply a ghost, an immaterial spirit. How truly she says of the doctrine of the resurrection to the old Christian church, how dear was this belief. We cannot but inquire, Why is it not as dear now? Simply because it has been supplanted by a doctrine which those early fathers were ignorant of, viz., the immortality of the soul. Again, she confesses a sad fact when she says this doctrine of the resurrection of the body has in some degree faded from the consciousness of the Christian church. This is but too true. We believe that the time has come to revive this grand old doctrine. But hear her words:—

“One of the most precious concessions which Christ’s religion makes to human love is embodied in this article of a Christian’s belief. We love our friend in a body. How dear that form! Those eyes, those lips, that hair, over which the grave has closed—how sacred! How vain to say to us, ‘Your beloved is a spirit—a bright essence gone to mingle with the great sea of spirit life!’ ‘Alas! how cold and vague to the mourning heart is all this! I want to see him again; I want again the eye, the smile, the voice, the SELF—warm, winning, living. A pure spirit, abstract, distant, will never content me; it will not be my friend.’ But Christ promises us in that immortal life not alone the soul and spirit, but the body of our friend. He consecrates our earthly love by promising to restore it to us by-and-by, glowing with freshness and stamped with the seal of immortality.”

“To the old Christian church of the first ages how dear was this belief! When they saw the bodily form racked, torn, mutilated, trampled by wild beasts, burned to ashes and scattered to the winds, still they said in triumph, ‘We believe in the resurrection of the body; we shall have them again and hold them to our hearts, our own, our beloved ones. We shall see those same eyes shining into ours; those same hands shall clasp ours; there shall be the old, familiar voice, the well-known smile. It shall be our own and no other—restored to us, far beyond death, immortal in God’s kingdom.’”

“Even in St. Paul’s time, there were doubters and philosophers who said: ‘How can this be? How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come?’ and St. Paul answers: ‘That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die, and thou sowest not the body that shall be, but bare grain.’ That is, this body you bury is a seed, which goes back to earth, but there is a vital power in it out of which God shall raise the new body, fresh and immortal, and ‘God shall give to every seed his own body.’”

“The lily that you lay in the dark earth to-day, in its pure beauty, shall decay and pass away, but another lily shall spring from it that shall never fade. In the resurrection, the oak shall arise an oak, and the lily a lily, and the violet a violet, ‘to every seed his own body.’”

“This preservation of human identity, even to the restoration of that bodily form, is a proof of the intense value set upon love by a God of love. It is as if he said to us, ‘I must make you pass through a terrible experience, a dreary, inexpressible sorrow; but trust me, it shall be only for a moment. This apparent death of your dear ones is not real death. I will give them back to you better, brighter, more perfect than before, and in a world where there is no shadow of death to be feared. You shall have them, hold them, clasp them to your heart, a thousand times dearer for the great experience through which you have passed.’”

Many confuse themselves in thinking how and with what body this will be. Will our friend who died with silver hair come forth thus? Will he be as we knew him in youth? Will our little one have the fair curls and starry eyes of infancy? Here, as St. Paul says, there is a mystery. All we know is, there is a mysterious something, called personal identity, that remains about our friend through all the changes of life. The old wife fondly holds her husband’s hand and remembers when his white hair was black as the raven’s wing, when his step was firm and his voice was ringing; and he remembers when her hair was golden and her cheeks like roses; and yet both of them feel that this is the same. They knew each other in youth, they know each other now, and yet nothing could be more utterly different than their bodily appearance in youth and now. So, when they meet each other in the immortal home, in the new body made like unto Christ’s glorious body, there will still be that inexpressible something that constitutes personal identity; they will know each other for the same. The mother sits to-day with fond content and holds the hand of her son full of the life and vigor of manhood, and she doubts not that this is actually the same who once in snowy cap and long robe lay helpless in her arms. She has seen the infant, the rollicking, curly-headed child, the school-boy and now the full-grown man, and yet identity has remained unbroken through all these changes. Her son never has seemed unfamiliar or strange. So, in our immortal reunion in the world beyond death, we may believe that with the great and beautiful changes which will pass upon us will yet remain that beautiful familiarity, that sweet consciousness of identity.

This doctrine of the resurrection of the body has, in some degree, faded from the consciousness of the Christian church. St. Paul always spoke of that as the consummation of bliss, the grand central point of the believer’s hope. “I press forward,” he says, “if by any means I might attain unto the resurrection of the dead”; and he announces that the final triumph will be when this is accomplished. “When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory. O Death! where is thy sting? O Grave! where is thy victory?”

What a gift to this life is such a promise! How often we say, “If I only could be young again! if I only could live life over!” Well, you shall be young again, and you shall live life over! Your physical life—all that is worth keeping—shall be restored to you in a purer and brighter form, fitted for immortal wear and progress. Your friends shall be restored, familiar, dear, free from earthly defect, but with all the sweet memories and innocent identities of earth. “Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost,” the Master said, even over a basket of bread. It is said by philosophers that no particle of matter is ever lost, but all goes into new forms in the eternal economy. Much more shall no throb of love, no tenderness of the heart, no yearning of human affection, be cast by as worthless. All shall be held in memory, and all shall be restored fresh and bright. And this is what we Christians mean every Sunday when we say, “I believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.” D. M. CANRIGHT.