Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt: ... THE LATER WRITERS The idea of a bodily resurrection in the material sense received its fullest development through Tertullian, while with Origen the Pauline idea prevailed. The remaining monuments of the early church, falling within the third century and the first quarter of the fourth century, follow in the footsteps of Irenaeus and Tertullian, while the conception of Origen falls into disfavor. With the exception of Lactantius, the story of the resurrection from henceforth moves along the path which former writers have trod--with little increment. Methodius stands out most prominently. He vehemently assailed Origen's idea of the resurrection, and this occasioned a special work of his, On the Resurrection. The original work is lost, but large extracts have been preserved in Epiphanius and Photius. Like his Banquet of the Ten Virgins, it was in the form of a Platonic dialogue, in which the arguments of Origen are set forth and refuted. He declares that the resurrection body is to be identical with the mundane body: "The body shall rise with bones again joined and compacted with flesh" (Banquet of the Ten Virgins IX. 2). The only distinctive marks of the resurrection body are an absence of dissolution and a freedom from the stains and pollutions of sin. Through death the very root of sin is torn out of the flesh; and the body, like a restored temple, is raised up again with the same parts uninjured (I. 5);1 or it is restored like the recasting and remodeling of a statue when spoiled (I. 7, 8); or like the conflagration of the earth which, after being purified will again exist (I. 9). Christ, he declares, did not say that in the resurrection men are to be transformed into the nature of angels; he simply said we shall be as angels, but not...
