for the sake of proving to them beyond dispute that-- "Life is ever lord of death, And love can never love its own." This seems to me the most reasonable explanation of the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, and the impression produced by them on the minds of His disciples. Most of my New Theology friends will probably reject it at first sight, but at least it is consistent with the philosophic position assumed throughout this book, and seems to me to present fewer difficulties than any other in face of the New Testament accounts. But no theory of the resurrection of Jesus is absolutely indispensable or of first-rate importance; the main thing to be agreed upon is that Christianity started with the belief that its Founder had risen from the dead in order to demonstrate that death has no power to destroy anything worthy of God. In consonance with this idealistic view of the subject the ascension becomes understandable; it simply means that when Jesus had done what He wanted, the body was dissipated. No doubt primitive Christian thought naïvely regarded heaven as a place above the sky to which the physical body actually went, and Hades, or the under-world, as the place from which the spirit of Jesus returned to reanimate it before ascending to the abode of the Father. Plainly enough this is what Paul thought about it, but such a conception is now impossible to anyone; it could only exist under a geocentric view of the universe which has long since passed away. But when Paul speaks even about the resurrection of the saints, this is what he means. All the good who have died are waiting in the under-world, the shadowy home of the departed, in a state of existence which is only a sort of dream or sleep compared with that which they have left. From this under-world Jesus returned, "the first-fruits of them that slept." All who believe in Him will do the same sooner or later, will resume their physical bodies, and, like Him, ascend to the world above the sky. But seeing this geocentric cosmogony has been impossible for centuries past, why should we go on trying to squeeze Paul's language so as to mean something else than what it meant at first? Granted that he was right in believing, in company with all the rest of the primitive church, that Jesus showed Himself to the disciples after His crucifixion, what more do we need? Paul's theory as to the resurrection of every physical body is just nonsense in the light of our larger knowledge of the universe and its laws, and we may as well say so.