and our tremendous destinies, for planting our foot, humbly, yet firmly, upon the threshold of Eternity. Alas! for those who shrink from solitude, who live only on the surface of life, who find in the uninterrupted whirl of pleasure or of business a refuge from the solemn, yet friendly, voice that speaks in the soul's inner chambers. Alas! for those who know so little of the true source of our moral strength, as to see in such earnest communion with God only the indulgence of unpractical sentiment; and thus fail to connect these silent hours with the beauty and vigour of many of the noblest and most productive lives that have ever been lived in Christendom.

Does not the forest tree, while flinging trunk and branches high towards the heavens, strike its roots, for safety and for nourishment, ever deeper into the soil beneath? And is not this parable of nature interpreted by the highest lesson of grace; by the example of our Lord and Saviour in the days of His Resurrection glory?

What multitudes of men and women day by day throng the aisles of this Cathedral between its services, to marvel at the genius of our great English architect, or to gaze at the memorials of the famous dead! Would that of these some at least might be found to use it as being what it is, a House of Prayer, a place of welcome retreat from the torrent of care and business which surges unceasingly around its walls! Would that here too, men to whom time is money, might, in view of their eternity, come apart for a short while, to claim high fellowship with their Risen Lord; to brace themselves for their work, their sufferings, their unknown future; for all that may be in store for them between the moment which is passing, and that other inevitable moment, of such unspeakable solemnity to each and all of us, when this world will be already fading from their sight!

In these three respects, then, at least, the true Christian life is modelled upon the Resurrection. It is sincere and real: it is not like a taste or a caprice, for it lasts; it has a reserved side, apart from the eyes of men, in which its true force is nourished, and made the most of. Each Easter, we may trust, some additions are made from the ranks of indifference, or from the ranks of sin, to that band of servants of the Risen Jesus, whose lives are modelled on His. God grant that it may have been so this year! We sorely need such reinforcements to the Christian army, for the sake of the Church and of the country. It is by really risen lives that languishing Churches are invigorated, and that a visible advance in society of moral corruption and decay, ever pregnant with coming disaster, is most surely arrested. And this is the day of the Resurrection, when all who sleep in sin are bidden with a solemnity that is ever new to rise from the dead that Christ may give them light, when all who have risen are warned to keep their eye upon His life Who is the Model, as He is the Lord, of Christians.

not, as Hymenæus and

It will be followed by second and literal rising

For this first Resurrection is Philetus thought, the only one. another, and our place in that from the dead depends upon our share in this. "Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first Resurrection : on such the second death hath no power." Time is passing: each year, as it escapes us, adds, to use St. Cyprian's beautiful phrase, to "our store in Paradise." Since this day last year, it may be, many of us have parted with those, to part with whom has been to change the whole face of life, and to make the present more unlike the past than it ever, we feel, can be unlike the future. The sorrows of life would be more than we could bear, if in very 2 Tim. ii. 17, 18. c Rev. xx. 6.

a Eph. v. 14.

b

deed we had no future; if there were really nothing to uphold us beyond a few broken lights playing fitfully, as if in cruel mockery, upon the walls of our earthly prisonhouse. But our sorest losses matter not, if, as we know, death is but the gate of Life, and Christ the true Monarch of that happier world which lies beyond it. Only may He, by His supernatural grace, endow us poor sinners, in this present life, with some rays of the moral and spiritual lustre of His Own glorious Resurrection, and so hereafter "change our vile bodies, that they may be fashioned like unto His glorious Body, according to the mighty working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself." &

a Phil. iii. 21.

SERMON XXI.

SEEKING THINGS ABOVE.

COL. III. I.

If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.

THE

HE Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the grave speaks both to the understanding and to the heart, but it speaks, first of all, to the understanding. In days like ours, when the minds of men are much exercised about the grounds of faith, the Resurrection has come into the same sort of prominence in Christian teaching that it occupied in the very first days of the Christian Church. It is the great occurrence which beyond any other in human history proves that Christianity is from God. Christ Himself appeals to it as the certificate of His claims: His Apostle stakes the whole case of Christianity upon its literal truth: "If Christ be not risen, our preaching is vain; your faith is also vain." a But the Resurrection has a moral and devotional aspect too: it is at once the pattern of a true Christian life, and the force which invigorates it. "Like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so ye also should walk in newness of life." b b Rom. vi. 4.

a I Cor. xv. 14.

According to St. Paul, those great mysteries of our Lord's Life, His Death, His Burial, His Resurrection, are not to be looked at as merely events external to Christians, which took place in a distant country, and in an age long past; they were repeated in the soul of each sincere convert who sought Christian Baptism. First of all, the old sinful nature was crucified: "We are crucified with Christ, that the body of sin may be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin." a Next, the soul was "buried with Him in Baptism;"b hidden away, as it were, in the tomb of Christ from the associations of its old life; living a life that was hidden with Christ in God. Thirdly, the soul was raised to a new level of faith and practice, of thought and feeling, which is called "newness of life." The likeness of Christ's Death was to be followed by the likeness of His Resurrection: the power of His Resurrection was to assert itself in a movement ever victorious and upward, whereby the soul, while yet on earth, incessantly sought its true and eternal home. "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God."

Risen with Christ! What a life does not the expression suggest for us, poor sinful men! The Apostle, it seems, thinks of Christians as leading a life like that of our Lord during the forty days that elapsed between His Resurrection and His Ascension into heaven. He had left His tomb, and He was seen again and again by Apostles and disciples, and friends and brethren. And yet between each appearance there were long intervals, during which He was withdrawn from sight, and preparing for the last triumphs of the Ascension. They who had seen Him never knew when He might not without warning appear again; on the sea-shore, or in b Rom. vi. 4. c Rom. vi. 4, 5.

a Rom. vi. 6.