SERMON XX.

THE MODEL OF OUR NEW LIFE.

ROM. VI. 4.

That like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

MASTER DAY is like the wedding-day of an intimate

friend our impulse as Christians is to forget ourselves, and to think only of the great Object of our sympathies. On Good Friday we were occupied with ourselves; with our sins, our sorrows, our resolutions. If we entered into the spirit of that day at all, we spread these out, as well as we could, before the dying eyes of the Redeemer of the world; we asked Him, of His boundless pity, to pardon and to bless us. To-day is His day, as it seems, not ours. It is His day of triumph; His day of re-asserted rights and recovered glory; and our business is simply to forget ourselves; to intrude with nothing of our own upon hours which are of right consecrated to Him; to think of Him alone; to enter with simple, hearty, disinterested joy upon the duties of congratulation and worship which befit the yearly anniversary of His great victory. "This is the day which the Lord hath made: let us rejoice and be glad in it.” a

Such are the first thoughts of loyal and loving Chris

a Ps. cxviii. 24.

tians: but they are not exclusively encouraged by the Apostles of Christ. Our Lord does not really end His work for us on Calvary; He does not suffer for us, and triumph only for Himself. We have a share in His triumph not less truly than in His sufferings:

"Thou knowest He died not for Himself, nor for Himself arose, Millions of souls were in His heart, and thee for one He chose : Upon the palms of His pierced hands engraven was thy name, He for thy cleansing had prepared His water and His flame. Sure thou with Him art risen; and now with Him thou must go forth,

And He will lend thy sick soul health, thy strivings might and

worth.

Early with Him thou forth must fare, and ready make the way
For the descending Paraclete, the third hour of the day."

"a

Not other than this is the language of St. Paul. If Christ died for us, He rose for us too. If He died for our sins, He rose again for our justification. If He is our model in His death, He is also our model in His resurrection from the dead. "We have been buried with Him," says the Apostle, "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."

I.

"Like as-even so." St. Paul's words will suggest to a great many minds a question which must here be answered. What is the connection, they will say, between the raising Christ's Body from the dead, on the one hand, and our walking in newness of life" on the other? Material things may be compared to material; spiritual things to spiritual; the resurrection of one body to the resurrection a Lyra Innocentium. b Rom. iv. 25.

of another; the conversion of one soul to the conversion of another. But if you pass these limits; if you compare a transaction in the world of spirits, as is a moral renovation, to a transaction in the world of sense, as is the resurrection of a corpse, do you not get forthwith into the region of the arbitrary and the fanciful? May you not, upon such vague principles of comparison as this, compare anything you like to almost anything else? and is not your comparison at best rather an ingenious exercise of the inventive fancy than a serious assertion of any real connection between two very dissimilar facts? This is probably the kind of question that is raised in the prosaic and realistic, or, as it would term itself, the practical mind of our day: and we do well therefore at once to ask, What is that common point between Christ's resurrection on the one hand, and the "newness of a Christian life" on the other, which St. Paul probably has in his thoughts, and which serves to explain his language?

The answer is, that the source, the motive power of the two things, of Christ's resurrection, and of the Christian's new life,—is one and the same. They are equally effects of one Divine agency. They belong indeed, themselves, to two different spheres of being. But that does not interfere with the fact of one common cause lying at the root both of one and the other. St. Paul glances at this truth when he prays that the Ephesians may know "what is the exceeding greatness of God's power to us-ward who believe, according to the greatness of His mighty power, which He wrought in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead." Why should God's power, as shown to us Christians, be thus in correspondence with the power which He wrought at the Resurrection of Christ? Why? Because the same Divine Artist shows His hand in either Eph. i. 19, 20.

a

a

work because the Resurrection of Christ is in one sphere what the Baptismal New Birth or the Conversion of a Soul is in another; because the manner and proportion of the Divine action here at the tomb of Christ, where it is addressed to sight and sense, enables us to trace and measure it there in the mystery of the soul's life, where it is for the most part addressed to spirit.

May not something of the same kind be observed in the case of the human mind? Our faculties, indeed, are very limited; and a mind capable of writing a great poem, or history, or work of fiction, and also of governing a great country, is not often to be met with in the page of history. Business capacity is often fatal to literary skill; men who write books are as a rule unpractical. But when we do find the two things combined in a royal author, or in a literary statesman, it is reasonable to compare the book with the policy of the king or the minister, on the ground that both are products of one mind. And it is further reasonable to expect that, allowing for the great difference of circumstances under which books are written and government is carried on, there will be certain qualities, evidently common to the two forms of work; that the book will sometimes recall the statesman, and the public policy of the country will be now and then more intelligible when placed in the light of some marked peculiarities of the author.

Such as this is St. Paul's position when he makes a comparison between Jesus Christ Risen from the grave, and a soul walking in the newness of its life. Both are the works of a single Agent; of one Powerful, Wise, and Loving Will. "The glory of the Father," which is said to have raised Christ from the dead, means the collective perfections of the Godhead; the Love, Justice, and Wisdom, as well as the Power of God. St. Paul, indeed,

in several places speaks of Christ's Resurrection as the work of the Father;a St. Peter, as the work of God, at least in two. But this does not exclude the agency of Christ's Own Divine Power in His Resurrection. Had He not said of His Body, that if this temple were destroyed, in three days He would raise it up? Had He not proclaimed, that as the Father raiseth up the dead and quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom He will?d Was He not announcing Himself, on the very eve of His sufferings, to be majestically free whether in life or death? "No man taketh My Life from Me, but I lay it down of Myself; I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again."e Do not Scripture and the Creeds alike state that Christ rose from the dead the third day; meaning that He was not simply passive, that in some sense the act of resurrection was His Own? The great Apostles, then, cannot be understood to ascribe Christ's Resurrection to the Father in such sense as to exclude the agency of the Son or of the Spirit. St. Paul's point is, that the Resurrection is a Divine work, and as such it occupies common ground with the new birth or conversion of a soul.

For, indeed, no truth is more clearly revealed to us than this, that spiritual life, whether given us at our first new birth into Christ, or renewed, after penitence, in later years, is the free gift of the Father of all spirits, uniting us by His Spirit to His Blessed Son. Nature can no more give us newness of life, than a corpse can rise from the dead by its unassisted powers. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh." A sense of prudence, advancing years, the tone of society around us, family influences,

a Rom. vi. 4; viii. II; Gal. i. I.

c St. John ii. 19, 21.

e St. John x. 18.

b Acts ii. 24, 32.

d St. John v. 21.
f St. John iii. 6.