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MYTHOLOGY
(iii) that those who obtain resurrection acquire
immortality, and are known as the children of God by virtue of their being the children
of resurrection. But the very first of these statements is fatal to the popular sense of resurrection according to which every one shall be made to rise up irrespective of worth. Jesus distinctly says that it is open only to those who are accounted worthy to obtain it,
The second particular is still more fatal to the popular belief according to which men and women shall be made to rise up in their physical bodies, with the prospect of a re-union of families. Now, if there is to be a distinction of the male and female amongst the risen dead, their condition would resemble that of Hindu widows whose cause Christians are ever ready to champion on the ground of its being inhuman and unjust to enforce a life-long widowhood on them. What, we ask, must be the plight of those residents of the post resurrection world who are formed male and female and who are never io know the happiness of married life? Will not the gift of the organ without its function be the source of the greatest conceivable misery in their case ? It is too much even to expect from every one of the uvdisciplined souls, that shall enter the kingdom of God, not through the strait gateway and narrow path of *works', but through the favour a saviour, to betake himself or herself to practising eternal celibacy, after the manner of a Jaina or Hindu widow ! Well, this is
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