A Resurrection of Relics is the title of a “Modern Churchman’s defence in a recent charge of heresy” urged against the Rev. H. D. A. Major, principal of a Church of England Theological College at Oxford, and Editor of The Modern Churchman. Presented by a brother clergyman to his bishop on a charge of heresy on account of a statement publicly made “that the form which the doctrine of the resurrection assumes in his mind is the survival of death by a personality which has shed its physical integument for ever,” Mr. Major has brought out a pamphlet in which he reiterates this statement and endeavours to defend his position.

He has been brought to hold what he does, he tells us, not merely “because of the intrinsic improbability” of the doctrine from which he dissents, “nor because of the scientific difficulties to which it was open.” He has been led to reject the doctrine “because it has become clear that Jesus Christ did not teach it.” With the Apostles it is otherwise, and “it may well be that the teaching of St. Paul is different.” But, if so, so much the worse for St. Paul. Like the Salvation Army lass when confronted with St. Paul’s teaching on women’s speaking in church, he has his answer ready. “Ah ! but that, you see, is just where I don’t agree with Paul.” There is only a single passage of Our Lord’s teaching to appeal to, so he tells us, for “the resurrection teaching of the Fourth Gospel is not easy to interpret” and may therefore, apparently, be left unexamined. The one passage which is decisive, in Mr. Major’s view, is the answer of Our Lord to the Sadducees, “I am the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.