Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

380 THE FORMATION OF CHRISTENDOMGodhead. But such a conception of the eternal andpersonal subsistence of the human compound had droptaway from the Gentile mind together with the beliefof a God creating and therefore absolutely detachedfrom the world. Thus it was that when the Apostlesurged upon their hearers the resurrection of Christin the body in which He suffered, and with it theresurrection of all men in their several bodies afterHis example, they set forth a belief which touched thewhole life and conduct of the heathen man in its everydetail. It was the greatest moral revolution whichcould be imagined, for it altered the value of everythingin the world. If this were true, that alsobecame true, " What shall it profit a man to gain thewhole world and lose his own soul ?"Not only hadJulius Cassar, and Tiberius, and Nero to look to it, butZeno and Cato of Utica no less, for what had Philosophyhitherto done with the soul ?Plato, after Pythagoras, and carrying on his doctrine,argued for the post-existence of the soul afterthe death of the body, on the ground of its pre-existeucebefore it entered into the body. And this again wasconnected with the doctrine that all intellect is oneand divine, and so not subject to death. Thus theyheld that when man's life on earth in the body began,it was not a creation but a union of the intellectualprinciple already existing with so much matter, a unionwhich was to terminate at death. Then the matterwould be resolved into other changes, and the mindwould recur to its former state. If therefore any distinctbeing was thus supposed to be carried on, therewas a want of continuity in its condition, unrelievedby any further hope. The body which had been thepartner and instrument of all its work on earth ceased