being, the key to his life, is there. The Gospel has made that yearning intense. Death has grown beautiful as a bride to earth's elect spirits. It is the way out into the free universe, the great congress of the first-born; the way to liberty, bliss, glory.

To die in Christ, believing in the life, rejoicing in the life, and in its inevitable triumph; hating the sin which is the anguish of death, and the terror of hell; praying "more light, more life," with dying lips; cleaving, with the strong prevailing grasp of a man who knows that if he loosens his hold he dies, to the Hand which has rent the prison-house, and has brought the captives forth,-to die thus is to enter into life. A moment's spasm, a choking sob, and then the free, broad universe for ever. The shadow of death behind us; pain, weakness, anguish—the straitness of a soul too large for its frame, its work, and its world become but half forgotten memories, lost at length in the joy which is fed for ever from the fountain of His life, "who was dead, and behold He is alive for evermore, and hath the keys of Hell and of Death."

XVIII.

THE RESURRECTION OF MAN.

"But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead."-I. Cor. xv. 20-21.

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FOR man, death has a significance unknown in all the inferior regions of the Creation. The creatures play under its shadow; man alone shrinks and shudders. Death is an unknown factor in the careless life of the Creation; it is a ruling factor, perhaps the ruling factor in the natural life of man. There is little need to hand the skeleton round at it haunts the secret chamber of every heart. It closes every vista; it rounds every pleasure; it casts a chilling shadow over life's sunniest passages; it lends a passionate sadness to passionate love. All the philosophies have spent their strength in trying to rob it of its terror, and to banish it to the background; in vain, it evades them, and plants itself in the foreground of every life.

Man, standing on the summit level of Creation, occupying the highest stage of development to which the creature has attained, finds himself consciously face to face with a new and terrible experience, which strikes a great shuddering dread into his heart of hearts.

Eve, when she hung over the blood-flecked brow of Abel, might well have prayed for the merciful stroke of annihilation, had she forecast all the bitter anguish of which death was destined to be the fountain, and let slip the promise of the overthrow of death, by Him who should be at once the seed of the woman and her Lord.

With new power, there comes to man in the unfolding of his life a new terror, and the terror seems to be the master. As matter of fact, man finds that life is not worth the living without the hope of immortality. From the shadow, which for the thoughtful, the cultured, the loving, that is for those in whom the higher development is most conspicuous, death casts over life, there is absolutely no escape. Omnes eodem cogimur; and to the natural man the way is dark and sad. We are made more dependent in a sense, we are more finely strung, more capable of tender devotion and clinging love, than the creatures; and we live and love under the shadow of the fear that at any moment, in a moment, all our dearest treasures may be scattered, and all our pleasant things laid waste.

That God-like faculty in man, as we cannot but call it, which looks before and after, which peers into the future, and must peer, finds everywhere the shadow of death stretched round its horizon, baffling its penetration, and mocking its efforts to search out the unknown. Is the shadow impenetrable? Is there nothing beyond? In that case the summit of creature development is simply a summit of agony ;

the creature attains to the height of its perfection only to recoil before a grisly shape of terror, and to upbraid the force, be it what it may, which has made the universe the theatre of this dark tragedy-on which may the curtain of the everlasting night fall soon!

The Scripture says, that the Father, who has led and watched over the development of the creature, places man, the glory of the Creation, before this awful mystery, and makes him know all its awfulness, that he may stir up faith to deliver him from the terror, and to open to him through the darkness the vision of a larger, freer, more glorious life. Accept this revelation and the shadow vanishes; life lies warm and radiant in the full light of the eternal sun. But if death be the bound rounding man's little life, and ending the development of his being for ever, the universe would become simply an Aceldama; the blood-drops that bead, not the Redeemer's brow only, but the brow of the Creation, are wasted: it is not a Redemption which they prophesy, but a dark struggle against a ruthless Fate.

And man, in any case, cannot but struggle and agonise for victory over the terror. A mother, as she watches the death pallor steal up over the face of her darling, but yesterday so gay and glad, cannot but moan and madden, if she has no vision to lighten her spirit, as she sees her one priceless treasure rifled, and the very casket that held it a mass of rottenness that she must bury out of her sight. And each generation sees, with a heart-ache which lies

near the root of the sadness of the world, genius full of passionate energy, and charged with glorious gifts for men, struck down in its young prime; parents with households hanging on their efforts, bread, and things more precious even than bread, depending on their constant toil, dropping in a moment and bequeathing to the nurslings of their tenderest care a hard struggle to the end of their days; lovers, whose very life is in each other, sundered at a stroke by the ruthless destroyer, and one torn heart left widowed, to drag its burden through lonely, weary, hopeless years; statesmen, on whose skill and knowledge the conduct of their country through a perilous crisis is hanging, with the destinies of unborn millions in charge, dropping at the helm in the supreme moment of danger, and leaving the vessel so richly freighted all adrift.

These are the shocks by which death keeps its hold on our anxieties and terrors, and conquers a place in the human imagination, and a space on the theatre of life, altogether disproportioned to the scale of our existence; unless it be the passage to a larger, more perfect, more blessed stage of development, where the anomalies of this lower sphere will find their solution, its broken promises their fulfilment, its blighted hopes their fruition, in the "Fatherland" which we seek, and which awaits us on high. Then we can understand perfectly, why the God who made us, and who means to bless us, should so compel our imagination to haunt this gloomy threshold; and should rule life so largely