the private chamber, He might show Himself without visibly approaching them. He was waiting still on earth until He had given His last instructions, and had completed the due measure of proofs that He was in truth alive. But He was but pausing. His eye was ever upwards; He was seeking "things above;" the "throne on the right hand of the Majesty on high," the manifested "glory which He had with the Father before the world was."b And Christians who have part in His Resurrection-life will be looking onwards and upwards. too. They too will seek things above; and they will prosecute this search by a triple effort; an effort of the understanding, an effort of the affections, and an effort of the will.

I.

"Seek those things that are above." This is the business, first of all, of the understanding; of the understanding of a Christian who has risen with Christ.

Among certain words which of late years have come to be employed in a narrow and inaccurate sense, there is the word "thinker." It is so used as to imply that only those men think at all, who bring their reasoning faculties to bear on the solution of abstract problems, and who give proof of this by their lectures or their books, or by some one of the customary means of securing intellectual notoriety. If this restricted use of the word were correct, the thinkers would certainly constitute a very small and select class indeed: but in truth it would be just as reasonable to confine the thinkers to this restricted class, as to say that a working man is only a man who works with his hands and muscles, and not a man b St. John xvii. 5.

a Heb. i. 3.

who works with his brains. All human beings, who are in possession of their faculties, are, in some degree, and very seriously, thinkers. Thought is not only or always the exercise of reasoning power: it observes, it contemplates, it measures, it examines, as well as, and before, it, properly speaking, reasons; nay, in a large number of human beings it never gets beyond these earlier processes, and yet it would not be true to say that they do not think. In truth the understanding is in action whenever any object is presented to it; and some object is present to every understanding during each of its waking moments. This is not the less true because the understanding often apprehends that which is before it in a confused and indistinct manner; or because it apprehends several objects at once, with the result that they present to it a blurred and indefinite whole. It is with the eye of the mind as with the eye of the body. If I walk down a London street, my eye rests upon a great number of human beings, and on a great variety of inanimate objects; and the successive images are not less real because they succeed each other so rapidly, and no one is distinguished from the rest without some deliberation and effort. So it is with the mind. It is not bereft of thought, or, as is contemptuously said, vegetating, because it is not keenly conscious of each step of its advance; the understanding is always resting upon something with whatever degree of deliberation; and this process is, properly speaking, thought; it is not the less thought because it does not go on to draw inferences and construct arguments any more than a limb in motion is less a moving limb, because it is not engaged in some gymnastic feat requiring both strength and practice.

We are all of us, then, properly speaking, at least in this sense, thinkers; and thus the solemn question arises,

"What do we think about?" What are the objects on which our thought rests, when it is free and at our disposal? For with many of us, during a great part of the working day, there is, of course, no choice as to the direction of our thoughts. We are obliged to throw them as completely as we can into our business, if we mean to get through it; if we mean to satisfy our employers or our consciences, and to do our duty by those who depend on our conscientious industry. To give your mind to what you have in hand is the first condition of all good work : and we may be very sure that when St. Paul was a tent-maker,a he did give his whole mind to the work of making tents, as if there was, for the time being, nothing else to be done in the wide world. But then there is a fixed hour at which business ends; and you regain, with the liberty of movement, the liberty of thought. What do you

habitually think about, when there are no demands upon you, when you are necessarily alone, when neither friends nor books put in a claim which has to be attended to? What do you think about, when you make no effort to think, when thought follows its own course, as if it were a natural force; in the hours of solitude, in the hours of darkness? The question is not unimportant. For the instinctive direction which thought takes at such times may tell us much about our real selves; about the path along which we are travelling towards eternity; about the judgment which is already forming with respect to us in the Mind of God.

Is it not the case, brethren, with many of us, that at such times thought is occupied with much which, to say the least, does not guide it heavenward? It is almost at the mercy of the first claimant. It is weighted with the importunity of sense; it is dissipated or distorted by the

a Acts xviii. 3.

exigencies of passion; it is darkened by resolute avoidance of the Face or even of the idea of God. What mean those long periods, in lives which were surely destined for better things, in which thought persistently haunts questions and subjects which a higher judgment condemns; in which it beckons

"foul shapes in dream intense,

Of earthly passion;"

in which it eagerly welcomes some work of fiction which, under the pretence of describing an historical period, suggests almost at every page that which it does not dare describe? What mean those long hours, or days, or months of sullen moodiness; in which the mind broods with desperate self-degradation over some trifling or imagined wrong; in which, as it surveys some real or supposed opponent, no excellence is recognised, and no failure unnoticed or unexaggerated; in which life is embittered for all around, but for none half so terribly as for the man himself whose thought is thus discoloured by selfish hate? Or what shall we say of those minds, too numerous, alas! in our day, who only raise themselves. above the mire and dust of earth to think of God as the capricious or heartless Master of their destinies; who trace Him everywhere in life as "an austere man, reaping where he had not sown, and gathering where he had not strawed;"a who would with their own hands paint clouds over the Face of the All-Merciful, and then complain that He is what they themselves have endeavoured to make Him ?

It is sometimes supposed that, if thought is only active, it must needs be good: that it is only when it stagnates that it breeds the deadly mischiefs which degrade the soul; that

a St. Matt. xxv. 24.

thought in motion is like running water, ever transparent and ever pure. Far be it from any of us to refuse honour to those who by vigorously exerting their reason honour the Creator in using one of the noblest of His gifts: but do not let us suppose that, because they so far escape a merely animalised existence, they necessarily raise either themselves or others. For thought may be exercised upon subjects which assuredly degrade it, and which therefore degrade it in the very ratio of its activity. The more resolutely a thinker thinks who believes that all that exists is really resolvable into matter and force, the more surely must his thought be itself materialised: the harder he works the deeper he buries himself in the thick folds of matter: nay, perhaps he even ends by proving to himself that the conditions under which, and the results with which, he thinks are such as to make any thinking at all a waste of energy.

Easter then is surely a summons to thought: and it bids thought rise heavenward with the rising Christ. The Resurrection is not merely a symbol; it is the warrant as well as the pattern of this mental resurrection. By rising from the grave Jesus Christ has made it possible for man to seek things above, as never before. Before He rose men had thought and written about another world; sometimes under the guidance of the earlier Revelation which was made to Israel, sometimes by the light of the natural reason, which was the guide to the peoples of heathendom. But at best the veil was only half withdrawn: there was no clear light, no working and recognised certainty, nothing that would stand the wear and tear of discussion, of passion, of trouble, of life. Men hoped and guessed; but Nature with its sullen uniformities was too much for them. When thought would rise to the world beyond, Nature seemed to frown discourage