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THE KEY OF KNOWLEDGE.
creed. Since it is not open to every one indiscriminately, but is attainable by those only who are accounted worthy of it, and, also, because it enables the deserving to rise up like angels, or Sons of God, it is a conquest of death itself, not a resurrection of the gross body of matter. Those, therefore, who are able, by their own merit, to rise above death, are alone entitled to be admitted to the Land of Bliss. But this is the old Indian doctrine of transmigration once more!
As regards the second point, namely, the possibility of a general resurrection, concerning which Jesus
said,
“And as touching the dead that they rise; have ye not read in the book of Moses, how in the bush God spake unto him saying: I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob? He is not the God of dead, but the God of the living : ye therefore do greatly err"is it not also clear that he did not, in any way, endorse the Sadducees' belief? If his words had not a deeper meaning, where was the necessity for this highly mystic and ambiguous language, winding up with the utterly inconsistent expression, "ye therefore do greatly err?" Does he not mean clearly that God, not being the God of the dead, [i.e., divinity being the attribute of the soul which is immortal by nature] cannot be considered to be the God of (that is to say, to be dwelling in the hearts of] the patriarchs, who, according to the belief of his in. terrogators, had died and were no more? In different language, what he hinted at was that the venerable patriarchs, whom ihe Jews swore by, were illusory forms of matter which had ceased to exist ages before and which could not be regarded as still living in the heaven
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