There are also several instances recorded in the word of the Lord, of departed saints having appeared to the men of this world, and they always came as living, active men, organized spiritual beings. When Peter, James and John saw Moses and Elias, those ancient prophets were talking with the Lord, which clearly implies that they were not simply disembodied minds, but that they had organized, spiritual bodies; and it is difficult to imagine that those bodies would receive any additional beauty or perfection by being again clothed with the dust which they once left in this natural world. An angel who appeared to St. John, declared to him, "I am thy fellow servant, and of thy brethren the prophets;" and yet he seemed to the apostle like a living man, for he says, "I fell down to worship before the feet of the angel which shewed me these things."
But while the word of the Lord thus plainly and distinctly teaches that the dead are already raised with spiritual bodies, and are living in the spiritual world, it must be acknowledged that there are certain passages which, taken simply in their literal sense, would seem at the first glance to teach the doctrine of a literal resurrection of the dead body. Our Lord says: "Verily, verily, I say unto you; the hour is coming and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live." And again he adds; "The hour is coming when all that are in the graves shall hear his voice, and shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life; and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation."
Now it will readily be seen that there are insuperable objections against understanding these words as referring to the resurrection of the material body. For the Lord says that "the hour is coming and now is," and yet nearly two thousand years have rolled away, while the bodies of the myriads that have died in ages past are still confined to the kingdom of dead matter. So that a literal resurrection of
