Miracles : parthenogenesis and resurrection : (some side-lights on theological subjects) / by J. Foster Palmer.

  • Palmer, J. Foster (James Foster)
Date:
[1914]
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Licence: In copyright

Credit: Miracles : parthenogenesis and resurrection : (some side-lights on theological subjects) / by J. Foster Palmer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    reproduction proceeds on a different plan, i.o., by change into two or several parts, and without the intervention of somatic death. This, perhaps, is hardly the form of immortality we are looking for, yet may it not be a kind of type, an earnest of a more continuous life, an analogy of things harder to understand ? Both in the Old and in the New Testament the ordinary sequences and processes of Nature are used to shadow forth the higher moral and spiritual truths. We have ceased now to employ this method on account of a supposed, though wholly imaginary, incompatibility of science with religion. Are we justified in doing so ? Is not the fact of our greater knowledge of the workings of nature only a further reason for employing them as a type of higher truths ? Here again we come in contact with that illogical frame of mind which distinguishes so sharply between physical and metaphysical. We never use the word resurrection except in the limited physical sense. But it may have also a metaphysical, i.e., a mental, moral or spiritual, sense. In the New Testament amo-Tao-is is used in all these senses, though it is not always translated in the same way. The first time we see it in S. Luke’s Gospel it refers to a moral or spiritual awakening. The Child Jesus, Simeon says, is set for the fall and subsequent “ Anastasis ” of many in Israel.* In S. John’s Gospel Martha speaks of the “ Anastasis ” of the last da}'.-]' Christ, the Giver of Life, speaks of Himself as the “ Anastasis.”J In the Acts of the Apostles the Athenians considered “Anastasis ” to be a kind of demon, or perhaps a goddess.§ “ Strange gods,” they said, “ Jesus and 1 Anastasis.’ ” During the materialistic wave of the last century, which, after all, I believe, was just a normal re-action from the Berkeleyism of the century before, it became the fashion to say that life without a physical, organic body, was inconceivable. It may be so, to some minds; but here again we meet with the fallacy that conceivability is the test of credibility—a very worn-out doctrine—and that the field of conceivability is a constant quantity in all individuals. Is it not, on the contrary, a very varying one ? The imagination, with which it is closely connected, varies infinitely. And is not this particular phase of its absence limited in distribution ? It is certainly not universal, and I should think that the great majority of people in the world can and do conceive of a spirit as existing apart from a physical body. If this be so, why should a small minority make laws for the world from their limited experience and limited powers of conception ! If A, for instance, is not able to conceive of a spirit existing without a