knew not before, but who is much less able than he was before to overcome it.

Certainly, if the world is to be overcome, it must be, as St. John tells us, by a power which lifts us above it; and such a power is faith. Faith does two things which are essential to success in this matter. It enables us to measure the world; to appraise it, not at its own, but at its real value. It does this by opening to our view that other and higher world of which Christ our Lord is King, and in which His saints and servants are at home; that world which, unlike this, will last for ever. A country lad may think much of the streets and homes of the little village in which he was brought up, until he has seen London. But when, after his first visit to this great city, he returns to his rural home, he learns to take a more modest and more accurate view of its architectural merits. The first step to overcoming the world is to have satisfied ourselves that all here is insignificant by comparison with that which will follow it. And faith opens our eyes to see this; to see things as they really are; to understand not only the origin of life, but also the true end of life, and the means whereby that end may be reached. When "the eyes of a man's understanding are thus enlightened that he may know what is the hope of his calling, and what the riches of the glory of his inheritance among the saints," faith enables him to take a second step. Faith is a hand whereby the soul lays actual hold on the unseen realities; and so learns to sit loosely to, and detach itself from that which only belongs to time. Especially are we nerved to overcome the world by faith in our Lord and Saviour, true God and true Man, for us men, Born, Crucified, Risen, Ascended, Interceding; Who gave His life for us on the Cross; Who gives it to us by His Spirit, and in His Eph. i. 18.

a

" a

Sacraments. It was not natural courage in the women and children, who yielded up their lives for Jesus Christ in the first ages of the Church, that made them more than conquerors; it was that they saw and held fast to Him, Whose very Name their persecutors cast out as evil. It is not good taste, or common sense, or ripe experience, or culture and refinement, which will enable any man now-a-days to conquer the strong and subtle forces which play incessantly around his soul, and which will drag him downwards with fatal certainty, if he cannot counteract them. Only when we are one with Him against Whom the world did its worst, and Who bent His head in death, ere by His Resurrection He overcame it, can we hope to share the promise of sitting with Him on His throne; even as He Himself also overcame, and is set down with the Father on the Father's throne.a a Rev. iii. 21.

VOL. II.

E

SERMON XXIII.

THE RAISER OF THE DEAD.

PHIL. III. 20, 21.

The Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself.

HERES

ERE we have one of those clear glimpses into the world beyond the grave, of which, after all, there are not many in the New Testament, and each of which is so dear to the faith and hope of a Christian. St. Paul had been speaking of some Christians whose interest was altogether centred in earthly things. Of these persons he says that their end in another life is destruction; that their god, or object of devotion in this life, is their lower appetites, or, as he puts it, with Apostolical plainness, their belly; and that their glory, or subject of thought and conversation, is that which will hereafter be their shame. In contrast with this way of passing life, St. Paul describes the life of Christ's true servants. Their conversation, he says, or their citizenship, is in heaven. They have not yet reached their country; they are only on the way to it; but already, before they touch its shores, they have been invested with its rights of citizenship, in con

sideration of the commanding merits and self-sacrificing generosity of their Leader. They are in the position of emigrants for whom the friendly government of a colony should provide beforehand a home and civic duties. Heaven, then, as being already their country, naturally occupies a first place in their thoughts; but they cannot set foot in it until a great change, a new and unimaginable experience, has passed over them. It is upon this change, and upon the Person of Him Who is to effect it, that their eyes are continually fixed while the present scene lasts. "We look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself."

Such a subject, my brethren, even if the daily lesson did not suggest it, connects itself naturally enough with Eastertide. Christ did not rise, as He did not die, only for Himself. He rose for our justification. In this present life we share His righteousness, when He gives us His new nature. But the virtue of His Resurrection is not exhausted on this side the grave. It secures to us a bodily resurrection in glory, at some distant epoch, when all that now meets the eye shall have passed away. This is the last and most magnificent of the gifts of our great and Risen Redeemer; "He shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself."

And death is throughout life so constantly dogging our footsteps that such a subject as this can never be uninteresting. How near any one of us might be to it, we may have noted only in yesterday's paper. There we

a Rom. iv. 25.

read how a man whose devotion to geological science during many years has long since won for him a European reputation, and the beauty and simplicity, and, let me dare to add, the religious sincerity of whose character, have commanded the affectionate respect of a very wide circle of cultivated friends, passed two days since, by what we should call the most natural of accidents, out of the very midst of his intellectual interests into the world of the dead. None who knew the late Professor Phillips,a and understand the place he held in the world of thought as an honest and truthful student of Nature, while firmly believing in man's spiritual destiny, will regard his death as other than a serious loss to the religion, as well as to the higher learning, of this country.

I.

What is the nature of this change referred to in the text?

Observe St. Paul's way of describing the human body in its present stage of existence: "our vile body," or, as it would be more exactly rendered, "our body of humiliation."

The human frame appeared to Greek artists the most exquisite thing in nature: it was the form which seemed to them most nearly to unveil a Divine Beauty to the eye of sense. We know from their sculptures which have come down to us how fondly they studied it; they have left in stone the splendid record both of their genius and of their enthusiasm. How impossible it is to imagine the phrase, "our vile body," upon the lips of the men who decorated the Parthenon! Such a phrase belongs to another and a totally distinct world of feeling and of

John Phillips, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Geology at Oxford.