IX. But here arises a question of greater difficulty. How can the resurrection, which is a peculiar benefit of Christ, be common to the impious and the subjects of the Divine curse? We know that in Adam all were sentenced to death;[682] Christ comes as “the resurrection and the life;”[683] but was it to bestow life promiscuously on all mankind? But what would be more improbable, than that they should attain, in their obstinate blindness, what the pious worshippers of God recover by faith alone? Yet it remains certain, that one will be a resurrection to judgment, the other to life; and that Christ will come to “separate the sheep from the goats.”[684] I reply, we ought not to think that so very strange, which we see exemplified in our daily experience. We know that in Adam we lost the inheritance of the whole world, and have no more right to the enjoyment of common aliments, than to the fruit of the tree of life. How is it, then, that God not only “maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good,”[685] but that, for the accommodations of the present life, his inestimable liberality is diffused in the most copious abundance? Hence we see, that things which properly belong to Christ and his members, are also extended to the impious; not to become their legitimate possession, but to render them more inexcusable. Thus impious men frequently experience God’s beneficence in remarkable instances, which sometimes exceed all the blessings of the pious, but which, nevertheless, are the means of aggravating their condemnation. If it be objected, that the resurrection is improperly compared with fleeting and terrestrial advantages, I reply again, that when men were first alienated from God, the Fountain of life, they deserved the ruin of the devil, to be altogether destroyed; yet the wonderful counsel of God devised a middle state, that without life they might live in death. It ought not to be thought more unreasonable, if the impious are raised from the dead, in order to be dragged to the tribunal of Christ, whom they now refuse to hear as their Master and Teacher. For it would be a slight punishment to be destroyed by death, if they were not to be brought before the Judge whose infinite and endless vengeance they have incurred, to receive the punishments due to their rebellion. But though we must maintain what we have asserted, and what is asserted by Paul in his celebrated confession before Felix, “that there shall be a resurrection of the dead, both of the just and unjust,”[686] yet the Scripture more commonly exhibits the resurrection to the children of God alone, in connection with the glory of heaven; because, strictly speaking, Christ will come, not for the destruction of the world, but for purposes of salvation. This is the reason that the Creed mentions only the life of blessedness.