Christian relic worship was primarily a natural conse- quence of the worship of the saints, and was closely connected with the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the hody^ which was an essential article of the apostolic tradition, and is incorporated in almost all the ancient creeds. For according to the gospel the body is not an evil substance, as the Platon- ists. Gnostics, Manichseans held, but a creature of God ; it is redeemed by Christ ; it becomes by the regeneration an organ and temple of the Holy Ghost ; and it rests as a living seed in ' Num. xix. 11 ff. ; xxxi. 19. The touching of a corpse, or a dead bone, or a grave, made one unclean seven days, and was to be expiated by washing, upon pain of death. The tent, also, in which a person had died, and all open vessels in it, were unclean. Comp. Josephus, c. Apion. ii. 26; Antiqu. iii. 11, 3. The Talmud- ists made the laws still more stringent on this point. '■' 2 Kings xiii. 21 (Sept.): 7ji|/aTo tHiv oaTwv 'EAi(rajf, Kal e^rjce Kal i(TTT) tTri tous TrdSas. Comp. the apocryphal book Jesus Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) xlviii. 13, 14 ; xlix. 12. ^ Plutarch, in his Life of Theseus, c. 36. 452 THIRD PERIOD. A.D, 311-590. * the grave, to be raised again at the last day, and changed into the likeness of the glorious body of Christ. The bodies of the righteous "grow green" in their graves, to burst forth in glorious bloom on the moraiug of the resurrection. The first Christians from the beginning set great store by this comfort- ing doctrine, at which the heathen, like Celsus and Julian, scoffed. Hence they abhorred also the heathen custom of burning, au(l adoj)ted the Jewish custom of burial with solemn religious ceremonies, which, however, varied in different times and countries. But in the closer definition of the dogma of the resurrection two different tendencies appeared : a spiritualistic, represented by the Alexandrians, particularly by Origen and still later by the two Gregories; the other more realistic, favored by the Apostles' Creed,* advocated by Tertullian, but pressed by some church teachers, like Epiphanius and Jerome, in a grossly ma- terialistic manner, without regard to the crw/ia TrvevfiariKov of Paul and the declaration that " flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God." "^ The latter theory was far the more consonant with the prevailing spiiit of our period, entirely supplanted the other, and gave the mortal remains of the saints a higher value, and the worship of them a firmer foun- dation. Koman CathoKc historians and apologists find a justifica- tion of the worship and the healing virtue of relics in three facts of the ISTew Testament : the healing of the woman with the issue of blood by the touch of Jesus' garment ; ' the heal- ' In the plii'ase ava.(TTacTis rrjs crapKos, instead of rod o'd fj-ar o s , resurrectio camis, instead