SERMON XXIV. 1 Cor. xv. 29, 30. Moreover, what must they do who are baptized for the dead, if the dead are not to be raised up at all? Why are they then baptized for them? and why are we exposed to dangers every bour? A GREATER variety of interpretations of this passage is to be met with than of any other in the whole New Testament; which shows that there must have been some difficulty in it. There is, however, one* which seems to arise so naturally out of the circumstances and connexion in which it is placed, that it makes it likely to have been the apostle's meaning. This I shall propose to you, not as a matter of mere curiosity, but as being in its nature most serious and edifying, and such as may yield many useful reflections. One of the congregation at Corinth, who * Given by Ezekiel Spanheim, and J. Edwards, B.D. fellow of St. John's college, Cambridge. denied a resurrection, gave occasion to the fine enlargement upon the important subject in this chapter. We find our apostle (2 Tim. ii. 18.) very severely censuring two persons by name, who maintained that the resurrection was already past. It seems most singular to us, that any one holding such sentiments should continue members of the christian society, as on the face of the thing it appears to be giving up all hopes of and reference to a future life, which is the principal doctrine of the gospel. But we shall misjudge concerning the persons in both these places mentioned by St. Paul, in making such conclusions for them. For, from the accounts that we have of those early times, there is cause to apprehend, that it was only a resurrection of the body to which these men objected, their false notions in philosophy leading them to condemn every thing relating to the body, to matter, which they held to be the source of every thing evil, from which the disciples of Christ were to be entirely redeemed. And one of the first christian fathers* thus relates the opinion of some heretics against *Irenæus, 1. ii. c. 56. whom whom he writes, that they held the resurrection from the dead to be only acknowledging of the truth which they taught. In short, they explained the resurrection of the dead to be a moral and spiritual change and renovation made in them on receiving the knowledge of the gospel in this life. Whether the man was misled by philosophical notions of this sort, or by whatever other delusions, it was an error of such magnitude, tending, with weak minds, to annihilate the resurrection of Christ himself, the very foundation of the gospel, and of all our hopes; or, at the least, to make a thing of that importance less attended to by introducing such fanciful ideas of a resurrection, that St. Paul determined to destroy the fallacy at once, by first pointing to the irrefragable evidence of the recent fact, that Christ himself was raised to life, from the testimony of his apostles, who had frequent opportunities given them of examining his person, and satisfying themselves about the reality; and in his being afterwards seen by more than five hundred persons, many of whom were alive to attest it at the time of the apostle's writing his epistle; and last of all seen by Paul himself. Having thus established the fact, that they might be the more impressed with it, he goes on to show the absurdities and contradictions that would be to be maintained if there was no resurrection that it would follow that Christ : was not raised to life, which he had just then demonstrated by such undeniable evidence, because our resurrection is the assured and appointed consequence of his. It would make the apostles guilty of impious forgery and falsehood, in pretending to work miracles, and appeal to the truth of God in support of their evidence, that Christ had been raised to life; which could not be if his followers were not also to be raised hereafter in their appointed time and order. A further most deplorable consequence. would be, if there was to be no resurrection, that those excellent persons who had given up their lives rather than deny their faith in Christ were lost, and disappointed of all their hopes and promises; for, if all the prospect of the christian's happiness was to be terminated in the present life, the apostles and others like them, who were continually exposed to sufferings and persecution, would be more hardly dealt with than the rest of mankind, which is what |