5. None of these answers will you give us. You turn to other
things, and by your tricks and shew of words prevent us from paying
close attention to the question. What! you will say, was not the
question about the resurrection of the flesh and the punishment of the
devil? True; and therefore I ask for a brief and sincere answer. I
raise no question as to your declaration that it is this very flesh in
which we live which rises again, without the loss of a single member,
and without any part of the body being cut off (for these are your own
words). But I want to know whether you hold, what Origen denies, that
the bodies rise with the same sex with which they died; and that Mary
will still be Mary and John be John; or whether the sexes will be so
mixed and confused that there will be neither man nor woman, but
something which is both or neither; and also whether you hold that the
bodies remain uncorrupt and immortal, and, as you acutely suggest after
the Apostle, spiritual bodies forever; and not only the bodies, but the
actual flesh, with blood infused into it, and passing by channels
through the veins and bones,—such flesh as Thomas touched; or
that little by little they are dissolved into nothing, and reduced into
the four elements of which they were compounded. This you ought either
to confess or deny, and not to say what Origen also says, but
insincerely, as if he were playing upon the weakness of fools and
children, “without the loss of a single member or the cutting off
of any part of the body.” Do you suppose that what we feared was
that we might rise without noses and ears, that we should find that our
genital organs would be cut off or maimed and that a city of eunuchs
was built up in the new Jerusalem?