bear relation to a former state of being. _Eub_.--All your notions are merely ingenious speculations. Revelation gives no authority to your ideas of spiritual nature; the Christian immortality is founded upon the resurrection of the body. _The Unknown_.--This I will not allow. Even in the Mosaic history of the creation of man his frame is made in the image of God--that is, capable of intelligence; and the Creator breathes into it the breath of life, His own essence. Then our Saviour has said, "of the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob." "He is not the God of the dead, but of the living." St. Paul has described the clothing of the spirit in a new and glorious body, taking the analogy from the living germ in the seed of the plant, which is not quickened till after apparent death; and the catastrophe of our planet, which, it is revealed, is to be destroyed and purified by fire before it is fitted for the habitation of the blest, is in perfect harmony with the view I have ventured to suggest. _Eub_.--I cannot make your notions coincide with what I have been accustomed to consider the meaning of Holy Writ. You allow everything belonging to the material life to be dependent upon the organisation of the body, and yet you imagine the spirit after death clothed with a new body; and, in the system of rewards and punishments, this body is rendered happy or miserable for actions committed by another and extinct frame. A particular organisation may impel to improper and immoral gratification; it does not appear to me, according to the principles of eternal justice, that the body of the resurrection should be punished for crimes dependent upon a conformation now dissolved and destroyed.