CURRENT LITERATURE.
Resurrection ; What is it? and What is its Relationship to the Second Coming of' Christ ? By James Cross. (Houlstou and Sons.)—This is a puzzling book. It is written by a person of evidently great earnestness of mind and devoutness of soul, but who is either wholly unaccustomed to recording thoughts and framing arguments in a written form, or is so deeply imbued with the special phraseology of a partietilar religious soot, that ho cannot or does not care to make himself intelligible to readers who are not familiar with that phraseology. Mr. James Cross is a gentleman with a grievance as well as a conviction, and the nature of his grievance is more clear than that of the recalcitrance to which it owes its origin. He appears to have belonged to some strictly governed body of Christ- ians—perhaps the Plymouth Brethren—who suffer no dissent from their doctrines without inflicting loss of " fellowship," for he has been 4' excommunicated. " for taking a line of his own in respect to the dogma of the resurrection of the dead. He declares that he holds the opinions which his book expounds, because ho believes there to be Scriptural. " For assorting my belief that they are derived from and supported by such an authority, I have boon," he says, excom- municated, or delivered unto Satan.' They who did this say that I deny 'the resurrection of the dead.' 1, on the other hand, solemnly declare to the reader that no doctrine of Scripture is more firmly rooted within my heart." We do not think the question, raised simply as a matter of dispute as to an individual's right to remain in fellowship with a certain community who repudiate his interpretation of an article of their common creed, is likely to interest that abstract creature, "the reader," at all, and we are bound to confess that, whether the fault be his or our own, we have failed to comprehend what the writer's opinion or belief respecting the resurrection really is. We can define what it is not. The religious body who have "delivered him unto Satan" hold, accords ing to Mr. Cross's statement of their faith, that "the Resurrection means, as regarde the saved, the raising of bodies from out of the graves in which they wore buried ; these bodies, during this process, being united to bodiless spirits, brought to them from the invisible world for this purpose ; and then the rising to or towards heaven of these united bodies and spirits in a spiritual and glorified state, so that they may bo manifested with °aria in glory at his revelation from heaven. What- ever the 203 closely-printed pages in whicheotnIvr.intoassferxiepnladinsmhaiys views, in the form of a dialogue with an QasilY- they certainly do not moan that ; and we are therefore of opinion that his "excommunicators" were, if not in the right, within their right.
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