Bethany; Or, Comfort in Sorrow and Hope in Death (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1871 Excerpt: ...external world and the material body are cast off; and the soul emerges, -bare and naked, to find its home with Christ in God. This, I repeat again, is a step in advance; it may be said to be a second resurrection. Here, on the earth, when Christ becomes to us "the resurrection and the life," the utmost we can look for, as regards the world and the flesh, is that we may be in a position, and may have power, to overcome the world and mortify the flesh. At death we cease to have any connection with a world needing to be overcome, and with flesh needing to be mortified. It is a great and blessed emancipation. And yet there may be a more excellent way. Absence from the world and the flesh, --exemption from what is here the needful task of overcoming the world and mortifying the flesh, --is not the perfection of our being. It is not the perfection of Christ's. If there can be a world that does not require to be overcome, and flesh that does not require to be mortified; if we can resume our worldly condition and our bodily frame, not only without the necessity of constant war against them in the spirit, but with the certainty of their ministering to our holiness and joy;--if we can return to this earth, or such an earth as this, renewed and purified, and return to it with bodies incorruptible, spiritual, and immortal;--is not this a higher hope than the other 1 And is not this our full and final hope in him who, as "the resurrection and the life," calls us, in and with himself, to "inherit all things'" He has himself a glorified body; he is coming to possess a renovated earth. We are to "bear the image of the heavenly,"--of "the second Adam, the Lord from heaven." We are to reign with him, sharing his throne and cro...