"The Body Glorified"

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 99, 29 April 1939, Page 10 (Supplement)

"The Body Glorified"

There is no book in which there are so many great words as the Bible, and one of the greatest of them is salvation. It is used, particularly in the New Testament, in the sense of deliverance from the love of sin and the guilt of sin; deliverance from our own bad selves and our own troubled lives. There are some people, however, to whom salvation means something very different, nothing lees, indeed, than the immortality and incorruptibility of the body. They refuse to believe that the body is essentially mortal and corruptible, and that it cannot inherit the eternal world, and assert that it is our destiny, through spiritual evolution, to attain a state of consciousness wherein we shall neither die nor decay, and, in our flesh, shall see God. One of those to whom this is the new and the true theology is Mrs. Mary E. Simpson, of Christchurch. So sure is Mrs. Simpson of it that she wants to share her discovery with those who are ignonant of it. She has accordingly written—for she know» how to write and to write well—and has published, through A. H. and A. W. Reed, a book with this object in view. It is in the form of a novel, and is called "The Body Glorified." As fiction it is charmingly, written, and has Christchurch and the Port Hills for its scene, but in plot and substance it is somewhat slight, and will remind elderly people of the sentimental and copious type of novel with which they were familiar in the younger days. As theology it is faulty and its interpretations of the Scripture passages it quotes are heterodox to a degree. Mrs. Simpson believes that matter aJid sickness axe little other than delusions, and there is nothing real but mind, and that the delusions can be dispelled by the exercise of mind. She believes, even more, tfoa>t thoughts and emotions can be transmuted into flesh. It is not surprising, then, that, on reflection, she has prefixed a foreward to her story in which she admits that her message will startle some people. It certainly will. And, what will startle them most, is her assertion, made dogmatically, that the reason Christ died was to show by example, that all mankind must eventually have an immortal body and be able to translate themselves to heaven. * ♦ ♦ ♦