Oh! does not this seem to place you among the worldly despisers of His Name?

To you then, brethren, and to all such He appeals as from His Cross to-day, and asks, "Is it nothing to you?" as if He marvelled at your indifference, as if He would move you by the sight of His Passion. Oh! may you listen to His voice, and look upon Him and mourn. May you turn to Him with penitent and contrite hearts, and learn to live henceforth not unto yourselves, but unto Him that died for you, the life of faith, the life of holiness, the life of fellowship with Christ.

And if that life should involve something of reproach and trial to you, be it so. For, remember, the once despised Jesus is crowned with glory and honour now. And "it is a faithful saying,-If we be dead with him, we shall also live with him; if we suffer, we shall also reign with him." Let us meekly follow Him as His true disciples here, and soon we shall be with Him where He is, and behold His glory.

SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, LONDON.

THE JOY AND POWER OF THE RESURREC

TION OF CHRIST.

ROMANS VI. 4.

"Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life."

(From the Second Morning Lesson for Easter Day.)

THIS Festival of Easter is the only one in the Christian calendar, which has not, mingling with its joy, some tone of sadness. Great are the joys of Christmas. Yet with that most blessed Birth into this fallen world, there is joined this thought, that even then began that life of sorrow, which the incarnate Son deigned to bear for us. And, after that first Feast, how soon do thoughts of woe darken every after anniversary of the earthly life of our beloved Lord! The year begins with His circumcision, and its sorrows. Then come the days of His fasting and temptation in the wilderness, that true beginning of all His ministry, of labour, sadness, tears, and buffetings of Satan; and this is closed by the agony in the garden; the bloody sweat at Gethsemane; the hall of Herod; the fierce cruelty of Rome's Pagan soldiers; the scourging, and the crown of thorns; the rejection by His own; the slow march towards the Hill of shame; its faint ascent, and the agonies of its summit; the Cross, and bitter Passion; death triumphing over the Lord of life and death, in its tardiest, most shameful, and most painful approaches; amidst [No. 26.]

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the yells of earth, the mockery of fiends, and the darkening of heaven! Then came yesterday the degradation of the grave, and the last triumph of the last enemy; and, in direct contrast with all these, shine forth to-day the bright lights of Easter; with no shade of sadness, not even with that which waited on the Ascension; for then He was parted from those who loved Him; and, in that parting, must be sorrow; to give Him up even to the heavens, must be grief to those who know what it is to have had His most blessed companionship. But here is no parting:-it is reunion; it is life from the dead; it is restoration after parting. Let any one of us, who has turned away from the grave in which we have laid the companion of years, the One whose presence made life gladsome, labour light, and pain almost joy because its sharpness drew forth such new and solacing demonstrations of affection,-let any one of us, who has known that hour of darkness, that awful, solitary, clinging sense that the misty fear, which has been for weeks terrifying him, is accomplished, that it has really happened, and that it is irreversible,-picture to himself what it would be, in that first hour of bitter loneliness, to have that form given back to him again warm with life, radiant with beauty and affection, and so triumphant over death, that it could die no more; and then he may imagine something, and yet but a little, of what it was to those who had companied with the Lord, to have Him stand, risen from the dead, in the midst of their overjoyed, amazed band! Yes! but a little. For, to make it perfect, we must have never known that there was a resurrection from the dead; our hearts and minds must have been altogether strange to those hopes, and beliefs, and assurances,

which cast a soothing light over the saddest Christian sepulture; and then we might understand something of what was meant by those words of joyful astonishment, "The Lord is risen indeed, and hath appeared unto Simon."

It is because it has ever been such a feast of joy, that Christ's faithful people have loved to read in Easter light all the parables of nature, which, even from the beginning, mutely prophesied of the coming glories of the Resurrection.

Thus the exuberant spring-time, clothing the dead and wintry earth with its rejoicing mantle of revival, and growth, and verdant beauty, and exulting life, has been read by the opened eyes of saints as a prophecy, written from the beginning on the page of nature, of the Resurrection of the Lord. So has the melting of the winter's mantle of snow, and the flushing forth of the green earth, been felt to be a recurring prophecy of the destroying, on that mountain of Sion, of "the face of the covering cast over all people, and the vail that was spread over all nations'." So has the glad breaking of every successive morning, as it supplanted the shades and horrors of the night, so has the springing of every seed from corruption into life, seemed, to those who were thus taught their hidden significance, to be types of this our Easter gladness, planted from the beginning amongst the generations of dying men, as a gracious foreshadowing of the wonderful gift of the Resurrection.

But to enter at all into this joy, we must put ourselves back in thought to what men were without those hopes and that knowledge with which we have been familiar from our earliest childhood, until by

1. Isa. xxv. 7.

degrees we forget that men were ever without their solace. For so we come to esteem these hopes our natural inheritance, which they are not; and to confound together man's state by nature, which is death, with his state by grace, which is life and peace through Jesus Christ. It is with us in this matter, as it is with a people, which, after a long and deadly struggle with some powerful and cruel enemy, has been blessed with victory and long peace. Even those who lived through them can hardly recall the feelings of those days of uncertainty and alarm. Their children, who have known nothing but peace, who have only heard of the name which once struck terror into the stoutest hearts, as the hame of a conquered enemy, now dead, or kept in captivity, cannot conceive by any stretch of imagination, what were the horrors of that doubtful conflict. Yet we must, if we would really understand our present state, try to go back in thought to what the Resurrection of Christ really was to those who saw Him die, and then received Him back again restored to life. For death was not then a conquered enemy. Nature,-full as she is to the Christian eye of parables of life-before Christianity had illumined her, gave no clue to what came after death. Speculation strove vainly to find a light in that darkness: even the old Revelation did comparatively little to dispel it. Man's soul, indeed, by the deepest instincts of its being, craved for a new life: but there was nothing to satisfy his craving. Death seemed to be annihilation manifestly the body corrupted and disappeared. The spirit too was gone: where? was it absorbed in the Great Spirit, as the drop of rain in the ocean? was it drunk up by the elements like water spilled upon the ground: was all over? That