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In our mysterious being we have a double existence; we are part of a body, and God deals with men collectively as communities: yet also we are as much single spirits as if we were alone in the world, each running separately and apart its individual course. To teach men from the first the awful, the difficult truth, that they have each of them a soul — this was the meaning of that discipline of Abraham and the Patriarchs; and the whole history has shown how necessary it was. The visible world is all about us, early and late, wrapping us around, occupying eye and thought and desire; we seem to belong to it, and to it alone; it seems as if we must take our chance with it. And, on the other hand, we know how easily men come to think that being one of a body — even though it were the "seed of Abraham," or "the Church of Christ" — made it less necessary to remember their personal singleness, their personal responsibility. To belong to a "good set," to a religions family, seems to give us a security for ourselves; insensibly, perhaps, we take to ourselves credit for the goodness of our friends, we look at ourselves as if we must be what they are. The soul has indeed to think and to work with others and for others, and for great aims and purposes, out of and beyond itself. For others, and with others, the best parts of its earthly work is done. But first, the soul has to know that sublime truth about itself: that it stands before the Everlasting by itself, and for what it is. Abraham learned it, like Moses, like Elijah, like Isaiah, like St. Paul: in Job and the Psalter we see the early fruits of that discipline. The soul knew itself alone with God; no words could tell the incommunicable secret of the presence of God; and in that secret was wrapped up the seed of its conviction of its mysterious immortality — "God is not the God of the dead, but of the living." This is the first lesson of the masters of the spiritual life. This is the first opening of the eyes to the reality of religion, when it comes upon us in our heart of hearts, in the deep certainties of conscience, that in spite of all that fills the eye and is not ourselves, there is ourself and there is God; and we begin by degrees, as it has been said, to perceive that there are but two beings in the whole universe — two only supreme and luminously self- evident beings — our own soul, and the God who made it.

(Dean Church.)

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KJV: Then come unto him the Sadducees, which say there is no resurrection; and they asked him, saying,

WEB: There came to him Sadducees, who say that there is no resurrection. They asked him, saying,