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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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