I am lucky enough to have in my personal library a book entitled ‘The Mourner’s Friend or Sighs of Sympathy For Those Who Sorrow’. It is a collection of prose and verse compiled to give comfort to the grieving. Edited by J.B. Syme, published in 1852 by S.A. Howland in Worcester, Mass, USA; its contents are by American and European authors and some surprising famous names. My copy of the book has some water damage, ageing paper, and precarious binding, so before it deteriorates my project to preserve the words of the authors will find its way here on the MOLAM blog.
MORNING OF THE RESURRECTION.
WHAT a sight will the morning of the resurrection disclose ! Time no longer ! At the sound of God’s trump, all the dead start from their long, long homes of the grave, and come forth to the judgement ! Many shall awake to everlasting life. The sea and earth shall yield up their innumerable dead. But some men will say, “How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come ? ” And here Paul illustrates the subject by the comparison of grain, which must die before it can be quickened, and that the immortal body is no more like the mortal, than the blade and full stalk is like the corn which was sown. He continues his incomparable description of the scene : “God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.” As with the seed, so with the Christian at the resurrection : “It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption ; it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory ; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power ; it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. : As much as to say, we can no more comprehend the change in the plant than that in man ; but, “as we have borne the image of the earthly, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly.” To the grandeur of the scene in the resurrection, in which the dead are raised from the grave, and their bodies changed to such an incomprehensible degree, that corruption puts on incorruption, and mortality immortality, he makes this extraordinary addition, that those who are then living shall be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, and their bodies of flesh and blood be made immortal bodies ; the saying being for the first time brought to pass, Death is swallowed up in victory ; and all the redeemed, clothed with their house from heaven, break forth in harmonious concert, O Death ! where is they sting ? O Grave ! where is thy victory ?
What a scene, – the resurrection morn ! God gathering home his saints ; Christ come to take his bride home to the mansions he has prepared for her ! For whom are those glories prepared ? for whom those glorious spiritual bodies ? For those who shall have part in the first resurrection.
