From His Collected Works, 1772.

THEY who assent to the possibility of the resurrection of the same bodies, will, I presume, be much more easily induced to admit the possibility of the qualifications the Christian religion ascribes to the glorified bodies of the raised saints. For, supposing the truth of the history of the Scriptures, we may observe that the power of God has already extended itself to the performance of such things as import as much as we need infer, sometimes by suspending the natural actings of bodies upon one another, and sometimes by endowing human and other bodies with preternatural qualities. And indeed, lightness, or rather agility, indifferent to gravity and levity, incorruption, transparency, and opacity, figure, color, etc., being but mechanical affections of matter, it cannot be incredible that the most free and powerful Author of those laws of nature according to which all the phenomena of qualities are regulated, may (as he thinks fit) introduce, establish, or change them in any assigned portion of matter, and consequently in that whereof a human body consists. Thus, though iron be a body above eight times heavier, bulk for bulk, than water, yet in the case of Elisha’s behest its native gravity was rendered ineffectual, and it emerged from the bottom to the top of the water; and the gravitation of Saint Peter’s body was suspended whilst his Master commanded him, and by that command enabled him to come to him walking on the sea. Thus the operation of the most active body in nature, flame, was suspended in Nebuchadnezzar’s fiery furnace, whilst Daniel’s three companions walked unharmed in those flames that, in a trice, consumed the kindlers of them. Thus did the Israelites’ manna, which was of so perishable a nature that it would corrupt in a little above a day when gathered in any day of the week but that which preceded the Sabbath, keep good twice as long, and when laid up before the ark for a memorial would last whole ages uncorrupted. And to add a proof that comes more directly home to our purpose, the body of our Savior after his resurrection, though it retained the very impressions that the nails of the cross had made in his hands and feet, and the wound that the spear had made in his side, and was still called in the Scripture his body, as indeed it was, and more so than according to our past discourse it is necessary that every body should be that is rejoined to the soul in the resurrection; and yet this glorified body had the same qualifications that are promised to the saints in their state of glory,—Saint Paul informing us “that our vile bodies shall be transformed into the likeness of his glorious body,” which the history of the Gospel assures us was endowed with far nobler qualities than before his death. And whereas the Apostle adds, as we formerly noted, that this great change of schematism in the saints’ bodies will be effected by the irresistible power of Christ, we shall not much scruple at the admission of such an effect from such an agent, if we consider how much the bare, slight, mechanical alteration of the texture of a body may change its sensible qualities for the better. For without any visible additament, I have several times changed dark and opacous lead into finely colored transparent and specifically lighter glass. And there is another instance, which, though because of its obviousness it is less heeded, is yet more considerable, for who will distrust what advantageous changes such an agent as God can work by changing the texture of a portion of matter, if he but observe what happens merely upon the account of such a mechanical change in the lighting of a candle, that is newly blown out, by the applying another to the ascending smoke. For in the twinkling of an eye an opacous, dark, languid, and stinking smoke loses all its smell and is changed into a most active, penetrant, and shining body.