THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 :ASTER 
 
 A COLLECTION 
 
 FOR A 
 
 EDWARD E. HALE 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 J. STILMAN SMITH & Co., 
 
 30 FRANKLIN STREET. 
 
 1886.
 
 Copyright secured by 
 J. STILMAN SMITH & COMPANY, 
 
 1886. 
 
 Greenfield, Mass. : 
 Press of the H. 0. Watson Printing Company.
 
 BV 
 
 -7-2* 
 
 H / 
 
 "I ""HIS is a collection of sermons and of favorite poems, which I 
 have made for many friends. The sermons have been preached 
 in the South Congregational Church, at different times within the 
 last fifteen years. 
 
 EDWARD E. HALE. 
 
 BOSTON, April, 1886. 
 
 337278
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 PALM SUNDAY, Matt, xxi, 10, n 5 
 
 PALM SUNDAY 13 
 
 PASSION WEEK 15 
 
 THIRST 24 
 
 THE VICTORY 25 
 
 SOLACE IN SORROW 32 
 
 LIFE AND ITS ENEMIES 33 
 
 THE NEW BIRTH 41 
 
 INCREASE OF LIFE 42 
 
 THE LAW OF CHANGE 49 
 
 CONSIDER THE LILIES 50 
 
 LUTHER'S EASTER HYMN 58 
 
 EASTER 60 
 
 GOOD FROM EVIL 67 
 
 THE MIRACLE OF LIFE 68 
 
 EASTER DAY 76 
 
 THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS 79 
 
 THE FAREWELL AT AZAN 86 
 
 THE LIFE WAS THE LIGHT OF MEN 87 
 
 "IHE SECRET PLACE OF THE MOST HIGH 94 
 
 IMMORTAL 95 
 
 LISTENING 102 
 
 MANY HOMES 103
 
 PALM SUNDAY, 
 
 "When he was come into Jerusalem all the city was moved, saying, 'Who is this?' And 
 the multitude said, ' This is the prophet Jesus, of Nazareth of Galilee.' " MATT, xxi, 10, n. 
 
 WITH the exercises of Passion Week, the Roman Church abruptly 
 leaps from ife commemoration of forty days of fasting in the beginning of 
 the Gospel Year, to its celebration of the end : the week of triumph, 
 trial and death. The latter service is far more appropriate than the 
 former. The asceticism of a formal Lent is scarcely in place in the 
 lengthening days of a year renewed. But of that week at Jerusalem, 
 in which the various lines of the Saviour's life are twisted all together, 
 in which all his prophecies of his personal life came to their fulfillment, 
 in which that life taught its last lessons and he bade the world fare- 
 well, of that week it is not strange that every word has been treas- 
 ured, and that the world has been glad to reproduce every picture. 
 Whether on canvas, or in song or story, or in the simple dramatic 
 representation which calls the world to the Upper Ammergau, where 
 simple peasants act out the scene ; these events of Passion Week come 
 up again and again, for the world's study, its questioning, its ad- 
 miration, and its tears ! Little wonder. And as little, that he who 
 hears the story told by a new narrator, or looks upon it from a new 
 standpoint, always finds in it as it goes on, something that is new. 
 
 Jesus had already excited the anger of the coteries of priests and politi- 
 cians at Jerusalem. He did not like them, they did not like him. 
 Nothing more different from his almost festive summer life in Galilee, 
 than the hard collisions, now with priests, now with policemen of 
 temple courts and the streets of the city. Such a city ! A petty pro- 
 vincial capital numbering perhaps 50,000 people, sustaining among 
 themselves all the j'ealousies and intrigues of a garrison town, and at 
 the same time those of an ecclesiastical metropolis. Magnify a hundred 
 
 (5)
 
 6 EASTER. 
 
 fold the petty squabbles of an English provincial cathedral town, and 
 you have, I suppose, some idea of the local politics of Jerusalem. It is 
 to be remembered that here only were the priests of the Jewish religion, 
 here only was the temple, here were all the sacrifices. But the 
 spirit of Judaism was now far higher and nobler than this old-fashioned 
 butchery of oxen and sheep in worship, though that had served well 
 enough for the expression of faith of a simple pastoral age. The spirit 
 of Judaism had risen to union in prayer, to instruction in the meet- 
 ing-house, it assembled congregations and preachers in every Nazareth 
 and Capernaum of the land. The priests inheriting their place and 
 privilege looked jealously at all this body of teachers, some of them 
 men of great distinction but none of them priests. Imagine, then, 
 with what disgust they must have looked upon a teacher like this Jesus 
 of Nazareth who came from the ranks, a radical come-outer as they 
 saw him, who spoke with a Galilean accent, and was followed by 
 Galilean admirers, when he came into temple courts, to denounce and 
 to ridicule them and their old-time butcheries. Nothing in the whole 
 story is easier to account for, than the dislike which Jerusalem had for 
 Jesus and his dislike for the leaders of opinion and life in Jerusalem. 
 
 The alliance of the political leaders with the church leaders at Jeru- 
 salem, was of the very closest. As long ago as the time of Herod the 
 Great, the Herod who killed the infants at Bethlehem, he had ennobled 
 the family of one of his many wives by making them High Priests, and 
 this family connection again and again appears in the line of the priest- 
 hood. This family alternated, at irregular intervals, in this high office 
 with Annas and his family. Annas himself held it for seven years, and 
 afterward was the real director of affairs when one of his sons, or his 
 son-in-law, was nominally in power. At the time of Jesus' death the 
 nominal High Priest was Joseph Kaiaphas, the son-in-law of Annas, 
 but Annas, or Hanan in the Hebrew spelling, was himself still the 
 advising and really efficient head of the priesthood, and with the 
 family of the Herods, which still had influence, he was on intimate terms. 
 Archelaus, the Herod who had reigned in Jerusalem, was now deposed, 
 ^nd Judaea was held by Pilate as a Roman province. But another 
 Herod, the tetrarch of Galilee, was in the city, as any other Jew might 
 be, for the religious solemnities of the season. Between him and Pilate, 
 as the gospel tells us, there had been some quarrel, but they made
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 7 
 
 friends over the Saviour's body, and their political relationships had 
 always placed them on the same side, the side of a dry and hard deter- 
 mination to maintain things as they were. 
 
 All these priests and governors had had enough and more than enough 
 of Jesus of Nazareth. Once and again he had been in Jerusalem, 
 driving the people wild with enthusiasm, calling away men's attention 
 from venerable forms of worship, and saying, without hesitation, that 
 there were ways of coming to God much nearer than these ways of al- 
 tar and temple. Once and again the wounded susceptibilities of these 
 leaders had roused them against him, to arrest him, to stone him for 
 blasphemy, to excommunicate his followers. But, thus far, the evident 
 popular favor had been on his side and had been too much for them. 
 The last time he was in the neighborhood, however, the old High Priest 
 Annas, whose nod was law, had given the word, impatiently enough, 
 " Ye know nothing at all, if you do not see that it is better for us that 
 this one man die, than that all of us be overturned together, and our 
 nation destroyed, in the loosening of all ties which will come out of 
 such heresy." Unconscious prophecy ! But it was spoken with no 
 thought of the sense we give these words ! Better he should die, if 
 things cannot otherwise be kept as they are. That was what the old 
 High Priest meant. It was his " word of order." 
 
 It is to a city whose higher circles are thus bitter against him, that 
 Jesus comes down again, on the day of triumph which we call Palm 
 Sunday. The wave of enthusiasm around him is the jubilant delight 
 of a few hundred Galileans, who are now sure that the time is come, 
 and that Israel shall enjoy her own again. The white city below 
 him, beyond the steep valley, covers the hard, set propriety and 
 insulted dignity of these determined priests. These Galileans know 
 nothing and care nothing. But Jesus knows, and he foresees the whole. 
 
 He loves Jerusalem as every child of David and of Abraham loved 
 her. " If I forget thee, oh Jerusalem, may my right hand forget her 
 cunning !" "Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth is Mount 
 Zion, the city of the Great King." Such were the songs they had been 
 singing as they marched, with the enthusiasm with which to-day we 
 sing, 
 
 " Jerusalem, my happy home, 
 Name ever dear to me ! "
 
 i> EASTER. 
 
 And with the same idea of a possible city of God, the home of 
 even- hallowed aspiration. But the real Jerusalem, this hot-bed of 
 priestly intrigue and political corruption ! Always its habits, methods 
 and vices had been hateful to Jesus, and always he had condemned 
 them. Not hard to make out that stupid, narrow dryness of the thou- 
 sand-year-old little town, which was left one side of the movement 
 of the world, and was priding itself on its traditions of the days of David. 
 Take your picture from any place you know of fifty thousand people. 
 Imagine such a town, half-garrison and half-cathedral, all living on 
 the State or the Church, all satisfied that country folks are fools, 
 indeed, that all the world, outside their own walls, are of some lower 
 order of being. Remember of Jerusalem that its only associations of 
 business with the outside, are when three or four times a year these 
 people came in, in their reverent faith, to render worship which they 
 can render nowhere outside these walls. If you care to go farther, im- 
 agine the seventy notables of such a town assembled in council, pur- 
 blind in their ignorance of God's ways in the larger world, working 
 their cause in the dark, backwards and forwards, like so many moles in 
 the ground, sure that they and they only are the centres of creation, and 
 that their interpretation of God, Law, Prophet and Messiahship is the 
 only interpretation. That is the Sanhedrim or Council of 70 of the 
 real Jerusalem, on which Jesus looked, even as the echo of the songs 
 which described the ideal Jerusalem rang in his ears. No wonder that 
 as he looked down on such a city he wept over it ! 
 
 " Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, if thou hadst known in this thy day, the 
 things which belong unto peace ! But now are they hid from thine 
 eyes 
 
 i" 
 
 He had been willing to accept the loyal homage of his Galilean 
 friends. A passage in the prophet Zechariah said, " Thy king cometh 
 unto thee meek, and sitting on an ass," contrasting the Messiah thus 
 with the lordly state of human royalty. Jesus accepts that figure, 
 sends for an ass to ride upon as he leaves Martha's and Mary's home in 
 Bethany, and in this humble state turns the brow of the Mount of 
 Olives, and meets the throng of enthusiasts who are pouring out, in 
 knowledge that he is coming. 
 
 It is the most beautiful as it is the easiest entrance into Jerusalem.
 
 PALM SUNDAY. g 
 
 To this hour travelers even from the west pass round the city to enter 
 on this side, and the general view from the Mount of Olives is that from 
 which they derive their abiding impression of the city. The summit of 
 that hill is half a mile from Jerusalem and completely overlooks it. The 
 city itself from this summit appears to be a regular inclined plain, sloping 
 gently and uniformly from west to east, or toward the observer. The 
 walls, almost in a quadrangle, are and were white to the eye ; and the south- 
 east corner of the quadrangle is that nearest to the eye. This is the point, 
 which as Christ looked down, was occupied by the gorgeous temple 
 which Herod had built on the site of Solomon's, really sheeted with silver 
 in places, and with gilded ornaments, in the lavishness of that Eastern 
 adornment, flashing in the sun. " Beautiful for situation," indeed ! " Joy 
 of the whole world !" It is this spectacle, always grand and always new, 
 which flashes on the sight of the jubilant throng of Galilean pilgrims, jubi- 
 lant because for the first time the favorite whom they have tried to crown 
 in vain, has assumed a symbol of triumph, however humble. ''Fear 
 not, daughter of Zion, thy King comes to thee." That is what he said in 
 substance, when he sent for the ass on which he rode. Because he 
 says this, the throng of wayfarers break palm branches from the trees, 
 palms always emblems of immortality and victory, wave them in the 
 air, throw them beneath his feet, and shout, " Hosanna to the King of 
 Israel ! Hosanna to him that cometh in the name of the Lord ! Hosan- 
 na in the highest ! " Yes, and the news of triumph is borne already 
 into the city. Beneath the feet of purblind priests and outside of their 
 musty councils there are those who have listened at the Feast of Taberna- 
 cles, nay, who have stood at the open grave of Lazarus. Easy for them 
 to catch the signal of his approach, and they run down the streets and up 
 the hill to meet the throng, with the same cry, " Hosanna in the high- 
 est !" 
 
 The whole city is moved, and catches up the cry. On the eve of a 
 festival, they have nothing to do but to run ami see processions, indeed, 
 they have nothing else to do at any time. A little town like that, in the 
 carelessness of Oriental life, would give up half its people to the wel- 
 come of the popular young leader from the North ; and the Ol-l Line, offi- 
 ciating at altar, or holding forth in temple courts, wouM find t'ley 
 were quite forgotten and deserted while the pageant went on. " Ye
 
 IO EASTER. 
 
 perceive that ye prevail nothing," says one of them to another, " behold 
 the world is gone after him." Unconscious prophecy again ! " 
 
 And so the enlarging multitude sweeps into the temple courts. The 
 mob from the city catch for the moment the impulse from the enthusi- 
 asm of the country, as mobs will. The children even are shouting, 
 " Hosanna !" " Master," says some official to Jesus in pretended respect, 
 " can you not silence these shouts? " " I tell you if these should hold 
 their peace the very stones would find a voice." But the little triumph is 
 soon over. The twilight of a short spring clay comes on, and he and 
 his go out to Bethany for rest. 
 
 The counter lesson of that triumph is told in the stormy passages of 
 the week,, in the crafty efforts to make him commit himself as a rebel, 
 and in his denunciations of the bigotry, hypocrisy, and irreligion, of these 
 blind leaders of the blind. The last contrast of all, is when the same 
 mob of Jerusalem, having been seduced as the leaders of mobs knew how, 
 to utter the other cry, shouts, " Crucify ! Crucify ! " where it did shout 
 " Hosanna !" The contrasted picture is the view of Jerusalem from 
 another Hill, as he and John and Mary look across upon it against the 
 blackness of the angry storm, and as another procession of the daugh- 
 ters of Jerusalem, wringing their hands and weeping in the bitterness of 
 their hearts, return from Calvary to the gates of the heartless city. The 
 story of Palm Sunday is not complete without the counter story of the 
 Friday which followed. 
 
 We may say that its warning is the warning to all cities, and all 
 countries, which have not a ready welcome to him who cometh 
 
 "In the name of the Lord," 
 
 Who are more eager for their old customs, or for the preservation of 
 their forms of etiquette, or for the trade that they have with some Edom 
 or some Egypt, than they are to hear the \Vord of the Living God, and 
 to welcome any messenger of His, though he be but a carpenter from 
 the Hill-countrv, riding on an ass from the Highway. 
 
 " You drive me away," said Jesus sadly. u The time will come when 
 you will need a message from God, and shall listen for it in vain.
 
 PALM SUNDAY. II 
 
 Armies shall gird you in. These sacrifices shall be impotent to buy heav- 
 en's favor. These long prayers shall be flung back and their worthless- 
 ness be shown. In the fall of your pride, nay, in the ruin of your city, 
 you may be willing to say what you chide these children for saying now, 
 
 " Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord," 
 
 Who comes in the name of the Eternal. He speaks the thing which is, 
 and cannot change. I Am has sent him. 
 
 We should better catch the spirit of the scene, if the words, " the name 
 of the Lord," thus expressed to us, what they expressed to them : the 
 absolute Law, the Law of Eternity. 
 
 Here is one who comes in the name of the Eternal. 
 
 Imagine such an announcement brought of a sudden into a meeting 
 of the real governors of one of our cities, Boston, Chicago, New York, 
 or New Orleans. They have come together to agree about the appoint- 
 ments, to settle a quarrel in the Council Chamber, or to arrange about 
 some votes with this or that leader of men. The door-keeper flings 
 open the door and announces a stranger. 
 
 " Is he a delegate from any ward?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " Has he a letter from Mr. Cleveland or Mr. Elaine?" 
 
 "Oh no." 
 
 " Does he represent the County Committee, or the State Commit- 
 tee?" 
 
 " Oh no." 
 
 " Then what is he here for? Send him away." 
 
 " Oh, he has come to tell us what is, what always is, and always 
 must be. He comes in the name of the Eternal." 
 
 " Then we don't want him here. Let him hire a hall. Gentlemen, 
 we will go on with our business." 
 
 It is exactly now, as it was then. We drop the idea from our Admin- 
 istration. We care only for the money that is dropped into the treas- 
 ury, and for the outward forms of administration. 
 
 Compared with taxes, and loans, and buildings, and places, this 
 office and that office, this ring and that combination, how slightly and 
 feebly speaks the Eternal Word ! How indifferent are men to this 
 carpenter or that fisherman, who has no word to speak of adventure
 
 12 EASTER. 
 
 or of wealth, but has only the word of God to proclaim, and has no cre- 
 dentials but that he conies in the name of the Lord. This man comes 
 to tell us of God's law of health, of what must be in our .city if we 
 would not have our children die. That man comes to tell us of God's 
 law of purity, of what must be, if manhood is not to die out of our sons, 
 and womanhood from our daughters. Another comes to tell us of the 
 law of mutual service, that sons and daughters must bear each other's 
 burdens. Another wants to tell us of mutual kindness and good-will, 
 that nation must not lift up sword against nation, if the Kingdom is to 
 come. Such a messenger never comes in state. "There is never a 
 trumpeter before nor a train of chariots and outriders. No, when they 
 say, " Lo Here or Lo There," of such a messenger, you maybe safe if 
 you do not go after him nor follow him. His entry into your city is 
 some humble ovation. Meek and lowly he comes to you, on the ass's 
 colt he has picked up by the highway. It is not what he looks like which 
 you are to judge by. It is the Word he has to speak to you. It is not 
 the procession of his followers which gives him dignity. It is the name 
 in which he comes. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. 
 
 Wo indeed to Jerusalem, because she cannot see the infinite worth of 
 such a prophet. 
 
 Blessing to any city which will look, not for the things that are seen, 
 but at the Eternal truth which is not seen ! 
 
 Blessing to any city, which will welcome any word which speaks and 
 pleads for the eternal good even of the least of her little ones. 
 
 Blessing to any city, which is not so weighted down by the burdens 
 of her own prosperity, but that she can look upward and forward to 
 the true prosperity of the City of the Living God. 
 
 Blessing to any city, which to any voice of the Spirit of truth, has 
 prompt and reverent answer ; which from its heart, in its law, in its 
 social order and in its daily life, will say, 
 
 " Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord."
 
 PALM SUNDAY. 
 
 BY JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 YE wnose hearts are beating high 
 With the pulse of Poesy, 
 Heirs of more than royal race, 
 Framed by Heaven's peculiar grace, 
 God's own work to do on earth, 
 
 (If the word be not too bold,) 
 Giving virtue a new birth, 
 
 And a life that ne'er grows old, 
 
 Sovereign masters of all hearts ! 
 Know ye who hath set your parts ? 
 He who gave you breath to sing, 
 By whose strength ye sweep the string, 
 He has chosen you, to lead 
 
 His Hosannas here below ; 
 Mount, and claim your glorious meed ; 
 
 Linger not with sin and woe. 
 
 But if ye should hold your peace, 
 Deem not that the song would cease. 
 Angels round His glory-throne, 
 Stars, His guiding hand that own, 
 Flowers that grow beneath our feet, 
 
 Stones in earth's dark womb that rest, 
 High and low in choir shall meet, 
 
 Ere His name shall be unblest. 
 
 03)
 
 14 EASTER. 
 
 Lord, by every minstrel tongue ' 
 Be Thy praise so duly sung. 
 That Thine angels' harps may ne'er 
 Fail to find fit echoing here : 
 We the while, of meaner birth, 
 
 Who in that divinest spell 
 Dare not hope to join on earth, 
 
 Give us grace to listen well. 
 
 But should thankless silence seal 
 Lips, that might half Heaven reveal, 
 Should bards in idol-hymns profane 
 The sacred, soul-enthralling strain, 
 (As in this bad world below 
 
 Noblest things find vilest using,) 
 Then, Thy power and mercy show, 
 
 In vile things noble breath infusing ; 
 
 Then waken into sound divine 
 
 The very pavement of Thy shrine, 
 
 Till we, like Heaven's star-sprinkled floor. 
 
 Faintly give back what we adore. 
 
 Childlike though the voices be, 
 
 And untunable the parts, 
 Thou wilt own the minstrelsy, 
 
 If it flow from childlike hearts.
 
 PASSION WEEK, 
 
 " Many believed on his name." JOHN ii, 23. 
 
 THE record of the first public visit made to Jerusalem by the Saviour 
 is that many believed on his name, but that Jesus did not trust himself 
 unto them. Nicodemus, of whom only is any detail given, came to 
 him by night to talk with him : and it seems as if this indicated his un- 
 willingness to have the interview known. This was at the Passover in 
 the early spring. Of his leaving that region this is the account, "When 
 the Pharisees had heard that his disciples baptized more than John he 
 left Judaea for Galilee." They were jealous of him and he went away. 
 
 The record of his second visit is that "the Jews persecuted Jesus," 
 because he healed a man on the Sabbath day. " Then they sought the 
 more to kill him because he spake of God as his own Father, making 
 himself equal with God." That God was his Father and our Father, 
 that we are all the children of God, was the first thing he had to teach 
 and to make them feel. For this they sought to kill him. 
 
 When he came to Jerusalem the third time the people were saying, 
 " When the Christ comes will he do more miracles than this man has 
 done ?" The Pharisees and chief priests on this sent officers to take him. 
 But no one laid hands on him. The officers themselves came back to 
 their chiefs and said, " Never man spake like this man." Day after day 
 they stood face to face, the priests dreading him, and he earnestly plead- 
 ing with them. Once they took up stones to cast at him, but he left 
 the temple and passed away unhurt. 
 
 He was in Jerusalem again in the beginning of winter, at the Feast 
 of the Dedication. It is just the same story again, with harder ani- 
 mosity on their part. They try to make him say he is the Messiah. 
 He says he is the Son of God. They try v to stone him, and he again 
 escapes from their hands.
 
 1 6 EASTER. 
 
 All these successive narratives enable us to stand in the place of these 
 city Pharisees and Scribes, when for the fifth time this Nazarene comes 
 down to Jerusalem, at the second Passover. His presence has been an 
 annoyance at every visit : an annoyance which has developed into contest 
 at the last. All the time the reputation of his movement on the East of 
 Jordan, in Galilee, and even in the provinces beyond Galilee, is 
 brought down to town. Who is he ? What does he say he is ? What 
 does Herod think of him ? Will Herod put him out of our way as he 
 did John the Baptist? They say he has not been seen in Galilee for a 
 few weeks past. Is there perhaps some hope that he will not come to 
 this Feast at all ? 
 
 They sought therefore for Jesus and said among themselves, as they 
 stood in the temple, " What think ye, that he will not come to the 
 Feast ? Now both the chief priests and Pharisees had given command- 
 ment that if any' man knew where he was, he should declare it that 
 they might take him." Their policy has been completely indicated by 
 Caiaphas. The Council- said, "'If we suffer this man to go on thus, all 
 will believe on him : and the Romans will come and take away our 
 place and our nation." To whom Caiaphas replied, "'Ye know noth- 
 ing nor do ye consider that it is expedient for us that one man should 
 die for the people." 
 
 They are but the most broken fragments of a history, all these little 
 hints which lead us along from step to step of their increasing hatred. 
 But the longest annals, in the nicest detail, would hardly make a more 
 distinct picture. If any one had told Nicodemus or his companions at 
 the first Passover, that they would kill the Galilean, brutally, and with 
 the whole force of the mob of Jerusalem, they would have cried, " Nev- 
 er." He was of flo such consequence. Indeed he seems, in some 
 regards, " a very amiable and deserving young man," they would have 
 said, if only he were not upset by his notion that he came direct from 
 God. But month by month goes by, summer, autumn, winter, he 
 never changes ; and they, alas ! do change. The spring season conies on. 
 The preparations for the Festival go forward. There is, as I said, just 
 the hope that he will not come at all, and that all ceremony may go 
 forward in the good old way, when, on the day after the Sabbath, in the 
 midst of the pilgrims from the East and North, here is a throng, a pro-
 
 PASSION WEEK. 1 7 
 
 cession, cheering, and singing, " Hosanna to the Son of David!" 
 " Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord !" " Hosanna in 
 the Highest ! " Palm leaves are scattered in the streets. Children are 
 shouting and singing in the temple. And here as calmly as if we had 
 never driven him out last year here comes again the Nazarene carpenter. 
 
 "Who is this?" 
 
 " This is Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth of Galilee." 
 
 And he has abated no jot from last year's pretensions. Just as he 
 did before he drives the hucksters from the temple courts. ' ' My Father's 
 house a house of merchandise ! " And when they come to him to ask 
 him to do, what they cannot do, and silence these boys cheering with 
 enthusiasm : 
 
 " I tell you, if these should hold their peace, the stones would imme- 
 diately cry out ! " 
 
 He has not receded. Not he. He comes in triumph now, where last 
 year he came secretly and alone. Unless priest and Pharisee take a 
 stand, who shall say what will come ? The whole tragedy culminates 
 therefore. Every hour shows how it culminates. " The chief Priests 
 and the Scribes and the Leaders of the people sought how they 
 might destroy him : and they could not find what they might do, for 
 all the people were eagerly attentive to hear him." And the next 
 morning : " Tell us by what authority doest thou these things, and who 
 gave thee this authority? " I will also ask you one thing. " The bap- 
 tism of John, was it from heaven or of men?" That is a hard ques- 
 tion. If they say, " From heaven." " Why did ye not receive him?" 
 But if we say, " From men." Ah, " We are afraid of the people. For 
 all the people held John as a prophet." So they had to say, " We do 
 not know." " Then I do not tell you by what authority I do these 
 things. But what think ye ? A certain man had two sons, and he came 
 to the first and said, Son, go, work to-day in my vineyard." And with 
 this beginning he goes on, just as he did when he first preached at Naz- 
 areth, to compare outcast with Pharisee ; child of sin, with child of 
 Abraham ; to show that God had no Peculiar People ; that if the Gen- 
 tiles did His will He was as well pleased as if the Jews did it. " Verily 
 I say unto you, the publicans and the harlots go into the Kingdom of 
 God before you. For John came unto you in the way of righteousness,
 
 1 8 EASTER. 
 
 and ye believed him not. But the publicans believed him. Yes, the very 
 harlots believed him, and ye, although ye saw that, changed not your 
 thought that ye might believe him. And I will tell you another para- 
 ble. There was a householder who planted a vineyard " 
 
 And from that beginning he went on to paint the picture of Israel's 
 steady decline and fall. We are used to it. We have read it and heard it 
 read, with spirit or without, mechanically or eagerly. But, after all the 
 mechanism or rote of eighteen centuries, it is still a terrible picture, as 
 you see at last the crisis. " What will the lord of the vineyard do? He 
 will come and destroy these husbandmen, he will give the fruit to oth- 
 ers ! " Everybody was moved. Everybody was excited with the 
 prophecy. " God forbid, God forbid ! " they groaned. And he looked 
 on them and said, " Have ye not read this scripture, ' The stone that 
 the builders rejected, has become the head stone of the cornice ?' The 
 Kingdom of God will be taken from you and be given to a nation 
 bringing forth the fruits thereof." 
 
 " They knew he spake of them," says the simple record. Of course 
 
 they knew it. But they feared the people. Of course they feared the 
 
 .people. It is worth remembering, that though the people is figured 
 
 only by that low mob of Jerusalem, the People is already born. They 
 
 left him and went away. 
 
 He did not go away. He began again. "The Kingdom of Heaven 
 is like a man who made a marriage-feast." And with this story, just as 
 he did at the beginning at Nazareth, he shows how the guests invited 
 reject the feast, and those from the highways and the by-ways enjoy it. 
 It is the only thing he will say to them : that the sons of Abraham have 
 no precedence, have flung away all advantage ; feast, kingdom, life, 
 heaven, are the equal blessing of every child of God. There are none 
 base born ! All are of the blood royal ! 
 
 Then they try to catch him in sedition, or to break him down before 
 the people. " Shall we give tribute to Ceesar?" " What is the great 
 commandment?" "Which brother of these seven should marry this 
 woman in the other world you talk of? " But he turns the tables 
 here, and from that moment there is no more questioning. No ! They 
 are too angry and he is too sad. He speaks his last word of protest. 
 "Woe unto you, Scribes and Pharisees." He will not die without
 
 PASSION WEEK. 19 
 
 showing such hypocrisy for what it is. " On you will come all the 
 righteous blood shed upon the earth ! Yes, it will come on this very 
 generation ! " 
 
 "Oh Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killest the prophets, and stonest 
 these who have been sent unto thee ! How often would I have gathered 
 thy children together as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, 
 and ye would not ! Behold, your house is left to you desolate. Ye will 
 not see me henceforth until ye shall say, 
 
 " Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." 
 And he went out and departed from the temple, and never entered it 
 again. 
 
 "Ye shall seek me and ye shall not find me, and whither I go ye 
 cannot come." This had been a part of his farewell. 
 
 " Will he go to the dispersed among the Gentiles?" Not he. That 
 is a question which such men put, and they only. He knows that this 
 is the hour, or "that his time has come." And he awaits the issue 
 with his friends. For these friends he speaks the last words of instruc- 
 tion or of warning. With these friends he joins in the New Year's festi- 
 val of their nation ; sitting as a father would sit at a Thanksgiving feast, 
 he asks them all to remember him. and to remember him always. And 
 they go over to the Mount of Olives as is their custom, and he parts 
 from them to go into the garden at the foot of the hill to pray. 
 
 I am not trying to follow his life nor theirs. I am trying to trace this 
 history as it unrolled for these dignitaries of the temple ; these priests 
 and senators who were leading Jerusalem and Israel to their ruin. 
 These men, by the natural downward haste of bigotry, these men, who, 
 last year, would have laughed you to scorn, if you told them that a car- 
 penter from Nazareth could turn them from their track, this way or 
 hat way, these men have in successive months gone through all the 
 stages of hatred. They have warned people not to harbor him. They 
 have warned them not to come near him. They have tried to arrest 
 him, they have tried to stone him and have failed. And now, they 
 have tried to make him commit himself in the presence of their rulers 
 and of his, and" they have failed again. The people cannot be relied 
 upon. The people are not sorry to listen to parable or invective so
 
 2O EASTER. 
 
 bravely spoken against the petty oligarchy which struts its hour and 
 keeps them under. The people may be on this side, may be on that side. 
 But we, chief priests and senators, we are nowhere unless this Nazarene 
 is put down before this week is over. Why, there has not been a feast 
 since he came to the surface, in which he has not been the chief and we 
 ridiculed as if captives in his royal train ! 
 
 It is to such men that there comes, just after one of these invectives, 
 Judas Iscariot, the thirteenth in the.Nazarene's company, who has given 
 to that number, thirteen, a bad name, from that day to this day. He has 
 blighted his own name with the same blight, so that the proud name 
 of Judah, Lion among the tribes of Israel, prince and king, has not 
 since he died been given to any child in the Christendom he did not 
 crush, no, though Judah were also the name of a brother of the Lord. 
 And Iscariot, the name that night of a village on the slope of Edom, is 
 since that night the definition of traitor in every language spoken in 
 Christian lands. To these puzzled, hateful, angry lords of an expiring 
 oligarchy, distrustful of themselves, of their own officers, of their own 
 future, there comes their fit coadjutor and companion, Judas Iscariot the 
 traitor. "I will betray him to you." "For how much?" "Well! 
 would you give as much as 30 pieces of silver?" " It is a bargain." 
 And on that great bargain they clasp hands. 
 
 So that while Jesus and his own are still at supper, while he is say- 
 ing in the last prayer, " Those that thou gavest me I have kept, and 
 none of them is lost, but perdition's child," Judas is in the presence of the 
 rulers, they are telling ofF the guards, men are looking at the blades of 
 their swords, are swinging their clubs, are falling into order in the 
 shade of the guard-house, that the bright moon may not show that any 
 arrest is planned. He counts his hours rightly. He leads them also 
 across Kedron. He enters beneath the olive trees into the court of the 
 garden, where Jesus is just awakening the three sleepers for the last 
 time. No question whom to arrest, for the traitor pushes his way into 
 the group, " ' Hail, Master,' and kissed him." 
 
 " Who is it that you seek? " he says to them. 
 
 'Jesus of Nazareth." 
 
 " I am he. If you seek me, take me, and let these go." So careful, 
 from the first, of his friends. * 
 
 " Are you come out against me as if I were a midnight robber, with
 
 PASSION WEEK. 21 
 
 your clubs and your swords ? I have been sitting daily with you in the 
 temple, and you laid no hands on me. But this is your hour, and the 
 power of darkness." Meanwhile they are binding him, and they lead 
 him away. 
 
 In these preludes you have the key-note for all the examinations, all 
 the taunts, all the doubts of that tedious night, and for all the cruelty of 
 the next day. By the time the sun is risen and the people of the city 
 are abroad, the plot is far enough forward for any fear of the people to 
 be dismissed. A mob is very terrible, but it is very fickle and it sides 
 very fatally with the stronger party. " Let our criminal be stripped and 
 bound, let him be kept where he cannot speak to this cursed people ; give 
 us a chance to contrast Barabbas, their favorite, against this Nazarene 
 whom they hardly know, and we can manage the people. Nay, we can 
 turn the people against this Pilate, he is cursed, too." On the weakness 
 of Pilate hung the fortunes of that day. 
 
 They play off Pilate against the mob, and the mob against Pilate. 
 Hour after hour the tumult quickens. The narrow streets of the little city 
 see this procession and that procession, as the King of the Jews is sent to 
 Herod, and as Herod sends him back to the Romans. All Pilate's force 
 is under arms, never doubt that. But what a handful, when you think 
 of this Asiatic mob, hating him, hating them, and hating the Caesar for 
 whom he stands and they. The end can be foretold from the beginning. 
 " When Pilate saw therefore that he could prevail nothing," but that an 
 insurrection was before him, what was one peasant's life, more or less, 
 to Pilate, or to Rome? " He took water and washed his hands before 
 them." 
 
 " I am innocent of the blood of this just person." 
 
 " Then delivered he him unto them to be crucified." 
 
 That is an awful picture, which a great master has drawn, of the 
 horror of the conspirators, after their plot has succeeded, after he is 
 nailed to the cross and hangs there dying. What would not every 
 man of them do, even Annas, even Caiaphas, if he could undo the 
 horrid work of that fatal day ? Notice how each actor whom we see in 
 it begs us to know that it is no deed of his. 
 
 Poor Pilate disappears from the story, saying, " I am innocent of the 
 blood of this just man."
 
 22 EASTER. 
 
 The centurion who obeyed because Rome bade him, as he would 
 have stood at his post had Mt. Zion vomited fire, said while he obeyed, 
 " Truly this was a righteous man." 
 
 The women of Jerusalem wept as he passed by. 
 
 And though one of these poor thieves charged him with being the 
 cause of their death, the other bravely says, "He has done nothing 
 amiss." Nay, Annas and Caiaphas themselves, only a few weeks after, 
 shake off the charge with a ghastly indignation, when they ask the 
 apostles if they mean to bring this man's blood upon them. And when 
 poor Judas stammers out, 4i I have sinned in that I have betrayed 
 innocent blood," they stammer in reply, " What is that to us? 
 What is that to us? See thou to that." If the night of Friday closes 
 in with abject wretchedness to John, and James, and Andrew, and 
 Peter, what is it to Annas, and Caiaphas, and Alexander, and the 
 rest of them ? 
 
 There are two who have not consented nor borne part in their act, 
 "faithful among the faithless," two out of seventy rulers of Israel, whose 
 eye is clear enough to look beyond Israel, and they bear the body 
 and lay it tenderly in the new tomb, in the garden hard by the place 
 where he was crucified. They roll a great stone to the entrance of the 
 tomb, and in the night again, after such a day, leave it there with the 
 reverence due to death. And Mary Magdalene was there, with the 
 other Mary, sitting over against the sepulchre. 
 
 And do you remember that their service of this very morning is a 
 service of death? It is because he is dead, because they know that he is 
 dead, that they bear their spices for his embalmment ! What is to them 
 that mystic prophecy of his of the third day ? They have seen him die 
 and they know the end too well. 
 
 What is it to Peter and Andrew, to James and John., to Philip and 
 Nathaniel and the rest? Had they not hoped for, almost seen, the 
 Kingdom ? And now where is the King ? Have they not been preach- 
 ing, "The Kingdom of God is here"? And now what mockery in 
 even- word of that proclamation, and in every triumphant welcome 
 which it received. So is it that that Sabbath, last of Jewish Sabbaths, 
 is the longest, darkest, blackest day of history. 
 
 For the next morning, on this day, " the first day of the week," says 
 the writer, why does he not say the first day of the new record of the
 
 PASSION WEEK. 23 
 
 world? "very early in the morning," even as the first gray light of 
 the sun dawns, these women are there with their spices and the tomb 
 is empty. 
 
 " O grave, where is thy victory? 
 O death, where is thy sting? " 
 
 The Past is past forever ! The old world of death and tears and terror 
 is really done with. The world of Pilate, and Barabbas, and Judas, 
 and Caiaphas, and such as they, has won its last real triumphs. 
 
 The new world, the world of life, and joy, and hope, the world of 
 saints and of martyrs, the world of sons of consolation and princes of 
 peace, has this day begun. 
 
 There will be pretended victories, as when Nero beheads Paul and 
 crucifies Peter, as when Julian tries to set back the hand upon the dial, 
 as when Rome again, as by the hand of another Pilate, burns Huss at 
 the stake. But never a real victory ! 
 
 There will be things men call failure, as when WyclifFe's ashes are 
 scattered to the seas, or when Coligny falls dead in the massacre of St. 
 Bartholomew, but never a final failure of the right. 
 
 John, James, Peter, Andrew, Mary, Salome, the Magdalene, see 
 now what the real kingdom is, and how it is to be won. So on this 
 resurrection morning is born the infant church, ready for its victories. 
 And the cry of joy of Mary Magdalene welcomes it to the world which 
 it is to save.
 
 THIRST. 
 
 BY FREDERIKA BREMER. 
 
 " I THIRST ! O, grant the waters pure, 
 Which flowed by Eden's rosy bower ; 
 The glorious, fresh, and silver stream, 
 The ever young, whose flashing gleam 
 Once before angel footsteps rolled ; 
 Whose sands were wisdom's priceless gold. 
 
 *' I thirst ! O bounteous source of Truth, 
 Give coolness to my fevered youth ; 
 Make the sick heart more strong and wise ; 
 Take spectral visions from mine eyes ; 
 O, let me quench my thirst in thee, 
 And pure, and strong, and holy be ! 
 
 " I thirst ! O God, great Source of Love ! 
 Infinite Life streams from above. 
 O, give one drop, and let me live ! 
 The barren world has nought to give ; 
 No solace have its streams for me ; 
 I thirst alone for heaven and thee."
 
 THE VICTORY, 
 
 " Lift up your heads, O ye gates ; and be lifted up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of 
 Glory shall come in." PSALMS, xxiv, 9. 
 
 IN the fancies of the early church the supposed descent of Christ into 
 Hell in the period between his crucifixion and his resurrection, was a 
 favorite subject of discourse and song. Such discourse and song have 
 left their track all through the literature and even the theology of Christ- 
 endom. You will find in Dante this and that reference to Christ's bear- 
 ing in Hell made as distinctly as any reference to his life as recorded 
 in the Gospel. All this structure of phantasy is founded on the words 
 in the Epistle ascribed to Peter, which say he preached to the spirits in 
 prison, and on the corresponding words in the Apostles' Creed which 
 say he descended into Hell. 
 
 Of these words in the Creed, I suppose the whole meaning to have 
 been that his death was real. But they were sufficient foundation for 
 the poets of the early church to build upon, and they built gorgeous 
 fabric of infernal legend. We are to remember that in days when to 
 attack the reigning powers of earth would have wrought misery to their 
 cause, they might say with impunity what they chose, as to the ruling 
 powers of Hell. 
 
 In such legend the words of the twenty-fourth Psalm, which we 
 have sung to-day, " Lift up your heads, oh, ye gates ! " were applied to 
 the gates of Hell, those gates over which Dante writes the words, 
 " All hope abandon, ye who enter here." 
 
 The heavy iron portal spiked above and bolted beneath, is, at the 
 word, to slide upward in its grooves, and leave the pathway beneath it 
 open for the King. "Lift up your heads; rise up before him." In 
 imagery like that to which Paradise Lost has accustomed us, the 
 Prince of Tartarus is represented as taunting Satan for his failures in 
 
 (25)
 
 26 EASTER. 
 
 attempting to overthrow Jesus and his Kingdom. " Of a sudden," says 
 Epiphanius in a sermon on this subject, " a voice of thunder was heard 
 in which Gabriel and Michael and an escort of angels gave to the 
 astonished host of Hell this old and eternal order : ' Princes, lift up 
 your gates ! Be lifted up, ye everlasting doors ! and the King of Glory 
 shall come in.' 
 
 " The Prince of Tartarus raged anew when he heard this sound, turned 
 against Satan and said to him, ' Go, fight this King of Glory.' Then 
 to his own servants : ' Close the gates of brass ; push home the bolts of 
 iron, and resist him to the last, lest we ourselves be taken captive.' 
 But the imprisoned saints, who, under hellish power, have been kept 
 there awaiting their Redeemer, cried out to the Prince of Hell, ' Open 
 your gates that the King of Glory may come in,' and as they made this 
 cry the voice of the chorus of angels from the outside was heard again, 
 ' Princes of Hell, lift up your gates ! Be lifted up, ye everlasting doors, 
 and the King of Glory shall come in ! ' 
 
 "Frightened and trembling, the Prince of Hell asks, 'Who is the 
 King of Glory? ' and it is given to David, one of his prisoners now, to 
 take up the words which he had sung a thousand years before, when 
 the rude portcullis of Jerusalem first shot up to give an entrance to the 
 rescued Ark. ' The Lord, strong and mighty. The Lord mighty in 
 battle. He is the King of Glory,' and at these words brass, iron, and 
 adamant crumble and disappear. 
 
 " The Lord Jesus in his human form enters and enlightens Hell. He 
 breaks all bonds. He releases all captives by his infinite power." 
 
 We are not to suppose that poet or preacher who repeated these 
 legends to the church of the fourth or fifth century, had any more 
 definite belief that these were literal facts than had the poet Milton, 
 that the events which he describes, either in Hell or in Paradise, were 
 visible and actual occurrences. There was many a reason in those ages 
 why poet or preacher should prefer to describe the Christian triumph 
 in a parable, than by naming in separate detail the princes who were to 
 be overthrown or the shrines which were to be destroyed. It is only 
 in the decline of spiritual faith and in the consequent hardening blind- 
 ness of that idolatry which always makes the image of more worth 
 than the idea, that such fancies made their way into the mythology of
 
 THE VICTORY. 27 
 
 the Middle Ages, and in the end took their part in that mass of clumsy 
 legend, which from the eyes of an eager world shut out the vision of a 
 loving God. The legend itself, for any one who will recall it, in the 
 simplicity in which it originally formed itself, is the enthusiastic triumph 
 of a world new born, for its deliverance from sin, from death and the 
 grave, from whatever princes of Hell and whatever kings of wicked- 
 ness ! It is simply the song of triumph which declared that for the 
 future there is no grave and is no Hell, such as old terrors had imag- 
 ined. It proclaims that there are no powers of earth which can stand for 
 an instant against the simple power of Heaven. It proclaims that 
 there is no death when God's children, resting in His arms and quick- 
 ened by His love, have once learned what life is, and what its infinite 
 sway. The legend, in its fashion, if you please in its clumsy fashion, 
 strikes the key-note thus e:irly, of all Christian literature and of all 
 Christian song. For you may take this as a general and central princi- 
 ple in criticism, that all science, literature or song, which recognizes 
 conscious life as the ruling principle of the universe, is Christian. 
 On the other hand, all science, literature and song, which makes you 
 believe in things or afraid of things or think that things can be, unmas- 
 tered by the powers of life, is such science, literature, or song, as in 
 such legends were rightly characterized as belonging to Hell and to the 
 Devil. 
 
 Lit sometimes seems easier to trace the great general laws of God's 
 government in the passage of events far from us, than in those close 
 around us. We see the shape of those far-off constellations, but we 
 cannot group or set in order that to which our own sun belongs. It is 
 easier then, perhaps, to see how life conquered death, how spirit 
 conquered form, how the idea dethroned the image in those days of the 
 new-born church, than in these whose dust and smoke are around us. 
 Of the victories of Life then, these preachers and poets hardly dared 
 speak, except in such allegories as I have read to you. Till the day 
 Christ died, Force, Brute Force ruled the world, that was the principle 
 of the great Roman Empire. It was the organization of human power. 
 At the head of that organization Tiberius sat upon his lonely throne. 
 One of the arms of that organization lay across conquered Judah. And 
 when the moment came, the tool of that organization, Pontius Pilate, 
 nailed Jesus Christ to the cross. Did he die? Can a kingdom like his
 
 28 EASTER. 
 
 kingdom die? The Idea with which he had inoculated the world can- 
 not die. It is Life that is its name. This Idea when he died, seemed to 
 live only in the faith and hope and love of a few weeping women and as 
 many ignorant men. Yes. But it did live there. And, because it lived 
 there, it has met, in a thousand battle-fields ; nay, on a thousand crosses, 
 with the Brute Force which till now has mastered the world. It is 
 like the old battle of Hercules with the Hydra. The child of Eternal 
 Life meets the hundred-headed dragon of the Deeps. And it seems as 
 if, for every dragon head that is lopped off, two more terrible appear. 
 Seems so. But in truth Life is gaining all the while. Brute force, 
 ,such power as there seems to be in things, cannot stand against ideas 
 which are eternal. And the groans of the King of Tartarus, and of 
 Satan, Prince of Evil, only represent under a metaphor the successive 
 ruins of every bloody superstition, of every form of slavery, of every 
 cruelty of patrician scorn, of every lust of every Claudius and Caligula, 
 which one after another give way, as the Lord of Life, whom they cruci- 
 fied, begins his reign. Pilate nailed Jesus Christ to the cross. Yes ! And 
 which was the stronger ten years after, Pilate, or this crucified Saviour? 
 The Roman Emperor was master, and the Nazarene was crucified like 
 a felon. Yes ; and which was the stronger, when one or two centuries 
 had rolled by, the Emperor of Rome still representing the brute force 
 of the world, organized never so deftly and wisely, or the crucified 
 Nazarene? Or, if from that day to this day we come down, what shall 
 we say of all the thrones and dominions and principalities and powers, 
 which have nothing but physical force to rely upon ? Thrones, domi- 
 nations, principalities, know now with a terrible certainty that mere force 
 of arms has no power which compares with that living word of the cruci- 
 fied Nazarene, that bears with it Eternal Life, and directs the duty of a 
 world of men whom he can lead, but who bend no knee to power. 
 
 Yet this lesson of Easter, the victory of Life over method, force, and 
 form needs to be asserted and maintained, as much in our time as ever. 
 We are always falling back into the conceited notion that we can devise 
 some machinery, which will do instead of hearty, resolute Life, of 
 brave and godly living. As in the beginning, they ate of the tree of 
 knowledge instead of the tree of Life. For instance, there grows up in 
 our crowded civilization, a blighted growth of pauperism, crime, drunk-
 
 THE VICTORY. 29 
 
 enness, parent and child of pauperism and crime, lust and beggary. 
 There is enough godly life in the world, for men to look with horror 
 on such hell in the midst of them. And, as they ought, they devise 
 this poor law, that tax, such and such restrictions, such and such prisons, 
 and then really expect that because their machinery is so ingen- 
 ious, and the science of the thing so nicely adjusted, the whole evil will 
 cease, that the paupers will be rich, and the licentious pure, and the 
 thieves honest, and the sick well. Fools and blind ! All this is like 
 the invention of perpetual motion. The water rises in your new hy- 
 draulic combination, yes, it rises to just the height where you poured it 
 in, there a<d no higher. The lever moves in your exquisitely ordered 
 machinery. Yes, it moves just so far as you push it, so far and no farther. 
 To open these blind eyes, to feed this starving crew, to heal these 
 scrofulous beggars, to give back these wasted infants to Rachel who 
 is weeping for her children, and will not be comforted, you need 
 Life ; you need the living, loving heart of living, loving men and women 
 to quicken other hearts which can live too and love too, and in their turn 
 will quicken others which are dying now. The better your machinery, 
 the simpler and the easier your work. But you fall back into heathenism, 
 and into these lurid fights of Satan against Pluto, if you suppose that 
 any machinery of your law, your taxes or your social science, is going 
 to do what only life can do. It is when Life and Love come forward 
 in their triumph, that these gates of hell crumble and are gone. Lift 
 up your heads, O ye gates, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting doors, 
 that the King of Glory may come in ! 
 
 We fall into the same mistake if we train our children to the knowl- 
 edge of things and methods, and let the divine life in them dwindle and 
 die away, the life which ought to manage methods and handle things. 
 How miserable a pretender the wordy orator, who has such store of 
 language, such grace of gesture, a presence so attractive, but has, alas, 
 nothing to say ! Or this writer, who sends to the hard-pressed editor her 
 reams of paper covered with lines of the right length and rhymes of the 
 right jingle, the large letters in their places and the small ones in theirs, 
 but all cold and dead, because there is no spark of faith, or hope, or love. 
 As for accomplishment, whether of body or of mind, it has always had 
 one law. Unless it were under the control, absolute and unflinching,
 
 EASTER. 
 
 of this Living Soul, God-given regent of mind and body, all accom- 
 plishment has been Satan and Mephistopheles, tempter to evil and ruin. 
 In the court of Tiberius, in the palace of Nero, there were accomplished 
 women and learned men. They did not play the piano, but they played' 
 on something as hard to learn as the piano. They did not calculate 
 percentages, or arrange to make corners in the food market. But they 
 did use brains that were quite as fine as ours in computations that were 
 qviite as difficult. And none of this accomplishment, nicety, or finesse 
 saved them or helped them to be saved. There was no life in these 
 palaces or courts. The Life had died out of them, till one day, a 
 prisoner who had pleaded before Nero spoke a word and another word 
 which some servant of the household heard : the word of Life, which is 
 Power, and the only Power, and in that word they began to live. Our 
 finest accomplishment and our most recondite learning are as worth- 
 less as theirs, till they spring into life at the touch of the same magic 
 wand, and unless they maintain life by the same talisman.J 
 
 I have spent a few days past in a region where the historical memo- 
 rials, and indeed some of the customs of to-day, carry us back to that 
 time which begins to seem mythical, when the Mayflower ran into 
 the bay at Provincetown, and found rest from long heaving and tossing. 
 In her cabin, as she lay there, was signed the first compact of government. 
 From her anchorage men went forth on the explorations which were 
 the beginning of an Empire. We linger fondly, we cannot linger too 
 fondly, on the records of their faith, and hope, and love. But is there 
 man, woman, or child of us who would go back to that life, to 
 live it as they lived it? I say nothing of physical hardship. I do not ask 
 whether we should like starvation, and cold, and loneliness like theirs, 
 though I might ask that fairly. Would any man or woman of us, who have 
 seen the vision of to-day, and know what to-day is achieving, go back 
 to the narrowness of their interests, to the pettiness of their thought, to the 
 range so circumscribed of their occupations and meditations ? Not one 
 of us who has imagination enough to conceive what that half life was, 
 or who can to-day put any fair estimate on the possibility of to-day ! 
 And this is simply to say that all those visions of old prophecy are 
 working their accomplishment in every home. He who sits upon the 
 white horse goes forth conquering and to conquer. Not in the fashion 
 which John of Patmos thought of, very likely. But in God's fashions,
 
 THE VICTORY. 31 
 
 a thousand times more grand, for victories a thousand times more sure. 
 He overthrows death, he conquers ignorance and sin, crime is more 
 hated, truth is more honored. Light overpowers darkness, good con- 
 quers evil. And if this is true here, it is only because it is true every- 
 where. Those Pilgrim Fathers were not little men, nor mean, nor bad. 
 They did the largest thing done in their time, and it showed faith most 
 vividly. But everywhere, as time passes, the eternal law is, that the 
 power which works for Righteousness succeeds, which is to say that 
 God reigns, or that His Kingdom comes. 
 
 [it is ours to enter into the victory. It is ours to refuse the cares of 
 smoke and dust, of the things that perish, and to enter into the reality 
 of Infinite Life. Ours to live as those 
 
 " Who live and move and have their being in their God." 
 
 Of this daily miracle of what is over what seems, the miracle of Easter 
 is the great commemoration. Indeed, the word miracle does not mean 
 any magic trick, setting aside the order of nature, it means the assertion 
 of the spirit over the forms and methods of dead matter. When the 
 Master of Life commands the life of one who trusts him to move the para- 
 lyzed arm, the living soul obeys and the dead limb does his will. On the 
 morning of this great miracle the living soul returned to the body it had 
 left, for the strength, the comfort, the new life of these weeping 
 women and these doubting men. In that return to earth, though it 
 were only to say farewell again, in those few days, though they had no 
 new lesson to teach, the Lord of Life quickened their lives that they 
 might truly live. From that open tomb they went forth on the mission 
 of New Life to which he sent them. The world of dead force was to be 
 a world ruled by hope and faith. The world of fear was to be a world 
 of love. The world of tyrant and slave was to be a world of brother and 
 brother. The world of death was to be a world of life. Northward, 
 southward, eastward, westward, they went forth to this mission of life. 
 Living, dying, teaching, blessing, comforting and curing, they were 
 true to this mission. And the symbol of Easter morning fulfills itself 
 every hour, as the tears of the world are wiped away, and its sorrows 
 healed. It was dead and is alive again. It was lost and is found. 
 
 " Lift higher your gates, ye princes of the people, and be ye lifted up, 
 ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory shall come in."-
 
 SOLACE IN SORROW. 
 
 BY AUBREY DE VERB. 
 
 COUNT each affliction, whether light or grave, 
 God's messenger sent down to thee. Do thou 
 With courtesy receive him ; rise and bow, 
 And ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave 
 Permission first his heavenly feet to lave. 
 Then lay before him all thou hast, allow 
 No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow 
 Or mar thy hospitality, no wave 
 Of mortal tumult to obliterate 
 The soul's marmoreal calmness. Grief should be 
 Like joy ; majestic, equable, sedate, 
 Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free ; 
 Strong to consume small troubles, to commend 
 Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting 
 to the end.
 
 LIFE AND ITS ENEMIES, 
 
 "God hath given unto us Eternal Life, and this Life is in his Son." I. JOHN v, ii. 
 
 ASK any simple Christian to tell you, in brief, the story of Christ's 
 Life; ask a child, or a savage who cannot read. He will say: "The 
 Jews hated him. Pilate tried to kill him. But he still lives, and will 
 live forever." This is a sufficient abridgment of the gospel. 
 
 Such an abridgment has its value, because when you thus come 
 down to the Rock, as Jesus himself would say, when you state the 
 real foundation of the Christian religion, you find it is Life. The 
 shrewdness of the shifty Jew and the force of the organizing and brutal 
 Roman take their fit rank of subordination. The Christian religion 
 asserts itself again in Christ's own words, the motto of this Church : 
 
 " I am come that they might have Life, and might have it more abun- 
 dantly." 
 
 Easter Sunday becomes the Sunday of Sundays, because it renews 
 this statement, that Life is the one essential. In the face of ritual, of 
 any formality or other physical corruption of religion, it asserts that 
 Life is the essential. And, in the face of dogma, enforced creed, log- 
 ical plan of salvation wrought out by intellectual process, it asserts 
 that Life is the essential. It may serve us, if we review the gospel stories 
 and find how this statement is the centre of what they say. 
 
 Jesus is so determined to enliven men that it seems, at the beginning, 
 as if he could not believe that they would cling to their grave-clothes so 
 desperately. His encounters with rabbinical learning and with decorous 
 establishments, of which the whole effort was to conform to what is 
 written, encounters qll full of his protest against what is superficial or 
 merely transitory, are, in fact, like the dash of the eternal sea upon 
 
 (33)
 
 34 EASTER. 
 
 the rock. The looker-on thinks the sea is repulsed, and that it is the clift' 
 which triumphs. It is only after a century that you see that the cliff has 
 been ground away, and that the eternal sea is still beating upon other 
 ledges which time has disclosed. There is no better illustration of the 
 absurdities of literalism of the follies of holding by a code which is 
 antiquated, of the vanity of knowledge as distinguished from wisdom 
 than this illustration, given by the conflict between the living Jesus 
 life-giving and these mummies, the literalist rabbin, the law-abiding 
 Pharisees of his time. 
 
 But he has to meet, not the learning of the time only, but the brute 
 force of the time as well, a carpenter's son on one side, and the Em- 
 peror Tiberius and the power of the Roman Empire on the other. 
 John's disciples, crazy with indignation, come storming around him in 
 Galilee to make him King of the Jews. That is enough to compromise 
 him. The garrison at Tiberias sends down word to the other garrisons 
 that there is another rising and another king. Pilate has heard of him 
 before the gray of that morning, when the chief priests bring him be- 
 fore his judgment. The wit and craft of Asia unite with the force of 
 arms of Europe to trample out this spark of the Light Divine. "Did 
 he say k more life'? We nail him to the cross." That is what Learn- 
 ing says, that is what the Right Arm of Power says when you talk of 
 "Life more abundantly." 
 
 And after the Learning of Asia and the Force of Europe have done 
 their worst, here are these women, testifying that the grave cannot hold 
 him. "And, before we know it, here are these followers of his, 
 preaching in the temple courts, just as he did pestilent fellow ! at the 
 Passover. Is there no end to this thing? Will it never die?" 
 
 No. That is just what it will not do. It will not die. It is all 
 through Jerusalem. They have caught the flavor of it at Damascus. 
 "Why, these Samaritans cursed heathen ! have heard of it at Neap- 
 olis. Down in Africa, that treasurer has carried it, whom we had 
 here with the offerings from ./Ethiopia ; and in Antioch, they say, half 
 the synagogues are mad with it. Do you remember that Saul quick- 
 witted, eager fellow at Gamaliel's school ? He has gone into this new 
 way. He is all over Greece proclaiming it." Such are the ejaculations 
 of the next twenty years. Clearly enough, this thing does not die easily.
 
 LIFE AND ITS ENEMIES. 35 
 
 "Were they right, who said we did not kill him on Calvary?" Yet 
 the history of " the New Way," as they called it, is always on the same 
 lines as the history of him who led the way. Always the wit of man is 
 trying to out-mancruvre it, or the force of man trying to crush out its Life. 
 There was never an enemy to the Life more dangerous than that wordy 
 Learning of those first centuries. All their cumbrous Egyptian triad-sys- 
 tem, three gods who are one God, has to be grafted into it. No religion 
 can meet the fashion of Alexandria, can meet the popular taste, which 
 has not its trinity. So the poor Christian Church, which started as 
 absolute religion, has to take on that bit of philosophical costume. Then 
 comes in the Persian system of two gods, a good god and a bad god ; 
 and the philosophers and creed-makers have to adapt the poor simple 
 faith to these demands. " Freedom of will and foreordination, what do 
 you say to them ? " This is the cry of Augustine and the metaphysicians. 
 And so another set of chains have to be riveted there. Poor, simple 
 "Way of God," which began with "love God, love man, and live for 
 heaven," one does. not wonder if its victories stopped, when it was 
 handicapped in the race by such dead weights as these. All this is to 
 make the wisdom of men take the place of the abundant Life, which is, 
 indeed, the very Life of God. Nor has "the Life made manifest" 
 any harder experience through the ages than in the midst of those hope- 
 less controversies. While ' men are pushing their words hither and 
 thither, from this square to that, trying to make this statement fit with 
 that, and that with another changing the order to meet this or that 
 inconsistency, and, after all, finding that the fatal block will not come 
 true in the arrangement, "The Life" is no longer manifested. In 
 that puzzle, a new paralysis steals over the race which had begun to 
 live. 
 
 And, at the same time, the "Christian Way" was repeating the 
 Master's sorrows on the other side. The Master had to meet the craft 
 ofCaiaphas and his Pharisees. He had to meet as well the force of 
 Pilate and his legions. The Life is always suffering between bodily 
 passion and mental subtlety. While the Church had its very life-blood 
 sucked out of it by those vampires of dogmatics, it was, without know- 
 ing it, dying out in the embrace of that very Roman Empire whose 
 anger it met in the beginning. In the long run, the friendship of the 
 Emperor Constantino has proved a heavier weight to it than the hatred
 
 36 EASTER. 
 
 of Nero and Diocletian. You cannot think of a worse gift for this 
 "Way of Life," or for its loyal professors, than to receive it at court, to 
 clothe them in the silk and purple and fine linen of Constantinople, to 
 feed them with its luxuries, and to give to them its patronage. Look in 
 those centuries for the "Life made manifest," and you have to search 
 for a jewel in a dung-heap. And one can well imagine the Enemy of 
 Souls of their mythology chuckling with Satanic glee when he sees " the 
 Life," which Pilate could not crucify and Caiaphas could not extinguish, 
 stifled at the court of Constantine or Justinian, under the mitres, the 
 flounces, and the embroidery of an archbishop's uniform. 
 
 Dead, embalmed, and buried indeed is your Manifested Life in the 
 history of some centuries, with all the show of an Egyptian mummy 
 or a cathedral tomb, and with as little life ; with etiquette and ritual, 
 with gorgeous pomp and lines of hierarchical service which only the 
 court of the lower empire could have taught, and with as much heart 
 and soul as that court knew and as little. 
 
 From such death and burial the resurrection comes in some valley of the 
 Alps, where the mountaineers read the simple gospel of Him who is the 
 Way, the Truth, and the Life. They reject all priests and bishops and 
 kings. They accept no sacraments nor other ordinances than they find 
 his instruction for. 
 
 The resurrection comes when Peter Waldo, in Lyons, under the 
 shadow of a gray cathedral, in the government of a political archbishop, 
 and a circle of political priests, creates the people's Bible, copies the 
 Gospels, the "Noble Lesson," as he calls it, for men to read in their 
 own tongue. 
 
 It comes in Toulouse, and in all that lovely Southern France, where, 
 with new refinement in life, with a new beginning of civilization, relig- 
 ion also assumes a gentler and simpler form, rejects of course the poli- 
 tics of Rome and the materialism of her ritual, to be crushed out, of 
 course, in blood and fire and death, by the cruelty of Dominic and of 
 Pope "Innocent." 
 
 The resurrection comes one day when Martin Luther, climbing on 
 his knees the steps of the Roman stairway, where tradition tells him that 
 such climbing shall buy oft' some years from purgatory, sees the lie and 
 denounces it. He sees that Life knows nothing of such formalism.
 
 LIFE AND ITS ENEMIES. 37 
 
 " Thou shalt be justified by faith ," by the inward certainty of the help 
 of God. 
 
 The Christian Life rose from the dead in that uprising of the nations 
 which we call The Reformation. And then, too, in the centuries which 
 follow, the same history repeats itself again. The Enemy of Souls, you 
 might say, moves out his heavy castle on the board, on the one side, 
 and the shifty bishop, on the other, against this poor little pawn, who is 
 not yet queen of the world. For a generation, in the enthusiasm of 
 new life, the men and women of Christ's way did open blind eyes and 
 deaf ears : they made the lame to walk, and what had been dead to live. 
 They subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, obtained promises, 
 stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, waxed val- 
 iant in fight, and seemed to promise a new kingdom. No Enemy of 
 Souls could have routed such an army of those who had found out what 
 the Law of Life was, if he had met them in square battle. But, when 
 they begin to teach each other how it is, and why, then the temptation 
 comes. ''What was God doing before he made the world?" " What 
 did God foreordain, and what came of his foreordination ? " "How 
 does God's justice in this business fit in with his mercy?" You know 
 that string of dreary questions and their hopleless answers. The older 
 among you remember the traces of them in your catechisms. You 
 know how the new Life ebbs away and dies when all this splitting of 
 hairs and instructing the Almighty come in. The power and miracle 
 of the Life had been promised to babes, and not to the prudent or the 
 wise. The power had come, and the miracles had been wrought, by 
 those whom the world called foolish, by those who were humble. 
 And the moment when it seemed necessary to call on the universities of 
 Europe to explain Christianity, or those learned in language or in logic 
 to teach it, in that moment it proved that the eagle had lost the bal- 
 ance of his wings, and could not fly ; the virgin had lost her chastity : 
 the lion had lost his teeth and his claws : the Lite was buried again be- 
 neath the weight of logic and learning. 
 
 And the other lesson repeats itself as well. Your new Life in the 
 freshness of its new birth, in the loveliness of this new simplicity, 
 
 " When unadorned, adorned the most," 
 is tempted, just as she was tempted before, into the alliance of princes and 
 
 337278
 
 38 EASTER. 
 
 potentates. It is just the old story over again. It is the old, false victory of 
 the lying romances, because she is simple. Your lovely maiden from the 
 hillside, who is lovely precisely because she does not know the follies of 
 courts, their etiquettes and frauds, is seen by the king as he is hunting 
 with his train. And he falls in love with her. Of course he falls in love 
 with her. He has never seen such loveliness at court as that loveliness. 
 Nay, he never knew such power as that simple power. Nay, he never 
 heard such wisdom as falls from those lips untaught. And so he marries 
 her and takes her to his palace. And there the romance always ends, in the 
 chiming of bells, in the blaze of bonfires, and in the brilliancy of illumi- 
 nation. Yes. there the romance has to end. For from that moment 
 the poor girl's loveliness declines, and her power ebbs, and her simple 
 wisdom stammers. She is lost in these intrigues of courts, and in the 
 damned falsitv of their etiquettes. She cannot lift them by her own 
 arm, and what happens is that they pull her down to their level. This 
 is just what happens to your Christian Church, to your simple New 
 Life just born again, so lovelv, so free, so pure, and so sweet, when 
 the kings of the earth come and make their court to her. Harry VIII. 
 in England, Henrv IV. in France, the Elector Frederick, or King Gus- 
 tavus Adolphus, are only so many passionate and selfish princes, just 
 for a moment bewitched by the eternal charm of purity and freedom, 
 but no more able than Nicodemus was, to be born again into like purity 
 and like freedom. You know what comes of such alliances, you know 
 what must come of th'em. Farewell to your hope there of the coming 
 kingdom ! No more hosannas for the Prince of Peace ! Farewell to 
 your paeans of triumph in the liberty with which Christ makes you free ! 
 Farewell to your glad hymns, to the spirit of Life in Christ Jesus ! 
 This is not life which stammers out its prayers in words which a king 
 directs. No : there is no such death as in the slavery of an exacted 
 form. 
 
 Whoever toils, blind with dust and well-nigh hopeless, in the annals 
 of the last century and the centurv before, and asks what has become of 
 ' The Life, once manifest." has his answer when he finds how the arms 
 of temporal power embraced the simple Bride of Christ, as the loving 
 old phrase called the Church. And again he finds it, when he reads 
 how the doctors of the universities bedrugged her and puzzled her.
 
 LIFE AND ITS ENEMIES. 39 
 
 And, whenever the Life appears, it is as you see a timid snowdrop 
 peeping up amid the frozen ground, or as you hear the song of a fright- 
 ened bluebird in the midst of the gales of March. The Life is in the 
 simple song of the Moravian brethren. It is as colliers and smiths and 
 hedgers and ditchers meet together at a cross-road, to listen to Wesley. 
 It is as the hunted peasants of the Cevennes defy the trained soldiers of 
 Louis. Always the story is the same. You sought your Lord in a 
 tomb, and you found him in a garden. Man had hewn the tomb. 
 Man had squared the stones. Man had rolled the rock to the door. 
 "But the tomb will not hold him." He stands under the heaven of 
 God with rising sun of morning revealing to you what you do not 
 make out through your tears. It is only when you tear off the cere- 
 ments of your metaphysics and logic, and swear to God that you will 
 seek only the Life, central and beneath all, that you find your Christian 
 religion as pure and sweet and simple as it always -was. It is only when 
 you tear off the ceremonies, which for their convenience kings and 
 priests have instituted. and throw them after the grave-clothes, to be 
 fretted by moth, and to find their own place in the ashes, that your faith 
 becomes what it was in the beginning. 
 
 The Life was manifested. We have seen it. We have handled it 
 with our hands. He has made clear to us the eternal Life as it was 
 with the Father. 
 
 It is easy to say this at the end of the nineteenth century. It is, thank 
 God, the simplest commonplace to say it. If I spoke of Christians 
 wbo speak the English language, I might safely say that, from the right 
 wing to the left, every communion of Christians would say to-day that 
 "Christianity is a Life, not a creed or a form." I could cite words to 
 that effect from leading writers of every communion, probably even in 
 the Catholic Church, certainly in all others. But, one hundred years 
 ago, to say that would be heresy- I believe we owe that verbal state- 
 ment, those particular words, to James Martineau, that great religious 
 philosopher, whose life and work alone would make it an honor to any 
 man to be called an Englishman. But the calm presentation of the truth 
 in language unadorned and unepigrammatic, language simple to bald- 
 ness, the statement made so definite and clear that men had to accept it, 
 when they hated to, this proclamation was the work of Chanuing, the
 
 40 EASTER. 
 
 hero of our time, whose birth next week is to celebrate. Mr. Agassiz 
 says of physical discovery, that it always passes through three stages of 
 comment : 
 
 1 . Men say it contradicts the Bible. 
 
 2. They say they discovered it themselves. 
 
 3. They say everybody always believed it everywhere. 
 Channing's calm enunciation of simple Christianity that it meant 
 
 "love God, love man, and live forever," that that is the whole of it 
 has passed and is passing through just those phases, i. Men said, it 
 was not in the Bible. 2. Now they all say they discovered it them- 
 selves, and that it is commonplace. Let us thank God for that. The 
 great victory will come when all men everywhere shall say that they 
 always believed it and always will ; that there is no intellectual dogma 
 in the Life of Christ ; that there is no form of machinery or method 
 requisite to it ; that it is simply Life, the Life of God in the affairs of 
 man. 
 
 Less and less shall men seek that life in their plans of salvation, in 
 ingenious tangles of their dialectics. 
 
 Less and less shall they seek it in camp or court, by ordered proces- 
 sional or sacrifice. 
 
 "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" These are only the 
 blocks which he pushed by. They are the bandages that tied him. 
 
 Pardon the blinded believer, if for a moment he do not know the 
 Master whom he thought dead, and who is alive. There needs but one 
 word of living love, and Mary knows him. There needs but a living 
 Church, ready to speak in his loving spirit, and the world knows and 
 believes. 
 
 Its religion is not a creed : it is not a form. It is the Life of God in 
 the soul of man.
 
 THE NEW BIRTH. 
 
 BY JONES VERY. 
 
 'Tis a new life ; thoughts move not as they did, 
 
 With slow, uncertain steps, across my mind ; 
 
 In thronging haste fast pressing on, they bid 
 
 The portals open to the viewless wind, 
 
 That comes not save when in the dust is laid 
 
 The crown of pride, that gilds each mortal brow, 
 
 And from before man's vision melting fade 
 
 The heavens and earth ; their walls are falling now. 
 
 Fast crowding on, each thought asks utterance strong; 
 
 Storm-lifted waves swift rushing to the shore, 
 
 On from the sea they send their shouts along, 
 
 Back through the cave-worn rocks their thunders roar ; 
 
 And I, a child of God by Christ made free, 
 
 Start from death's slumbers to Eternity.
 
 INCREASE OF LIFE, 
 
 " Because I live, ye shall live also." JOHN xiv, 19. 
 
 To Jesus Christ, the unseen world and the world which is seen are 
 one world and the same. We talk of "the other world," "the future 
 world," "the world above": he does not speak so. He speaks of 
 heaven as if it were now and here, or might be ; and, when they are 
 confused with what he says, it is often because they see double where he 
 sees singly. Nay : when he appears to be confused by what they say, 
 as sometimes happens, the best account we can give is that they are 
 talking of this visible world only, while he talks at once of the visible 
 and invisible. There are a hundred texts which show his feeling, 
 "Lo ! I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." " It is 
 my Father who doeth these works at which you wonder. You do not 
 see him; but, all the same, he is here." "Father, I know that thou 
 hearest me always. I would not have spoken aloud but for the help of 
 these who are standing by." And, when he expresses his trouble be- 
 cause language and metaphor fail him as they do, it is in this very 
 difficulty. Language, having been made by people who rely on their 
 senses, to answer the purposes of the visible and tangible world, breaks 
 down, and breaks down very badly, when it is applied to the range, 
 vastly wider, of that unseen world, which permeates this world, and 
 in which this world floats as a straw floats in the ocean. 
 
 Many of you remember our dear friend Starr King's celebrated dis- 
 course on " Substance and Shadow." He was at work there to remove 
 exactly this difficulty which the Master tried to remove, nor is there 
 work more essential for the Master's apostle. While we sat and list- 
 ened to Mr. King, we felt and knew what Jesus teaches. The things 
 which endure are faith and hope and love. Life is the substance, the 
 hard-pan foundation, from which these forms and things around us are 
 
 (42)
 
 INCREASE OK LIFE. 43 
 
 born. We cannot see life, nor handle it nor smell it nor hear it nor 
 taste it. But life is ; and without it nothing can even appear to be. In 
 the beginning is the Word. Mr. King made us wonder that we had 
 cared so much for this or that little thing, which is but a bubble tossed 
 on the eternal ocean. For the moment, you said you would not be so 
 fooled again. You would take fast hold on love, which you found to 
 be a reality. You would live in hope, or in the infinite world, seeing 
 that is the real world. You would trust wholly in God, seeing all being 
 is from him ; and these little things that perish in the using should fall 
 into their own inferior place in your regard or thought or action. 
 While that mood lasted, you caught the true Christian notion of life. 
 There are not two lives, a life of heaven there and a life of earth 
 here. These two lives are one life. As the Lord's Prayer says, ''God's 
 will is done on earth as it is in heaven." This opens out the meaning 
 of the more figurative phrase, '' The kingdom of God is at hand." 
 
 The knowledge, that life is indeed larger than the little world we see, 
 grows upon us in a thousand ways. The charm, always new, of 
 watching a baby's life, rests in our interest in the steps of such growth. 
 The little thing first learns its own hands, that they are its own. A 
 little more, and it knows its mother's face, and that she also is its own. 
 By and by, its world enlarges ; and at last it knows the whole nursery, 
 which seems a universe indeed, while it is a novelty, so much larger 
 than the petty world the child was in before. 
 
 Such steps as these are really enlarging our life all the time afterward, 
 though we do not perhaps note them with quite such eager curiosity. 
 But it is just such a step, when the school-boy, who but yesterday was 
 first in his class and could talk of nothing but the ambitions of the 
 school-room, finds himself the smallest boy in a great mercantile house, 
 where his existence is hardly suspected and nobody knows his name. 
 He learns, by hard rubs perhaps, that the world is much larger than 
 he thought. Yet his chief, the very "grand Cyrus" of them all, the 
 master of masters, has to learn the same lesson. He takes his holiday 
 on some favorable year, he crosses the ocean, he has or thinks he has 
 some business with one of the merchant lords of London or of Paris ; 
 and, when the interview has been arranged, after some negotiation, he 
 finds that he was never heard of before, that now his name is forgotten,
 
 44 EASTER. 
 
 that there are perhaps a hundred others waiting for their turn, and that 
 he, the first tradesman in his own county, may be yet a very small 
 person in the larger world. So in the world of politics, in the world 
 of literature, in the ambitions of fashion and society, precisely because 
 we are infinite beings, beings whose nature cannot be limited, we 
 find all the time that there is far more outside of us in life than we 
 have ever yet attained to. We cannot often enough say that life gives us 
 more, nature gives us more, the more we take. Yes, and the more 
 life gives or nature gives, the more they offer. 
 
 The robin in its nest looks into a world made up of a few leaves and 
 boughs around. As the feathers of its wings grow, it flutters a little 
 from the branch, and is astonished to find that the orchard is so large. 
 The bird of passage, when the instinct bred by the season carries it far 
 north or far south, learns that the covert of a few trees, orchard or 
 grove, was nothing to this larger world. Man, of all animals, compasses 
 the whole globe ; and then man, in turn, studies the universe outside of 
 it, and finds that this world is a speck, and only a speck, in that uni- 
 verse of whose laws he finds out more and more every day, for they are 
 not beyond the ken of a child of God. 
 
 The village boy growing to manhood finds that he is a member of the 
 State as well as of the village. He does not lose his interest in the base- 
 ball club or the singing-class, because he has gained an interest in the 
 politics of the State, or is at work for the State Fair, or has been chosen 
 to the Legislature. Then a great crisis comes upon him, and his life 
 enlarges again. Sumter is fired on, and he takes a commission from 
 the President, and enters the service of the nation. Still, he belongs to 
 the village, and to the State. His life as a citizen of the State does not 
 cease because he is an officer of the nation. Such is the illustration of 
 the common life", life here and life in heaven, which Jesus Christ is 
 always trying to make us comprehend, even by symbols which he owns 
 are inadequate. You do live in Chester Square or in Union Park ; but 
 you also live in Massachusetts, and have duties and pleasures which 
 to that life belong. More than this, you are a citizen of the United 
 States, and as such have other duties and relations. Nay : even if you 
 do not cross oceans or continents, you are also a citizen of the world, 
 and as such have a life yet larger. More than this, says the Saviour of 
 men, you live in heaven, and have relations, pleasures, and duties, as a
 
 INCREASE OF LIFE. 45 
 
 child of God, as a child of heaven. They are not apart from to-day's 
 duties or pleasures. Rather they are all knit in with them. Nor are 
 they the life of a to-morrow, unattainable until to-day is done with. 
 They are the life of to-day, all mixed in with life which is visible and 
 tangible. A woman's new life when her first child is in her arms, 
 wholly dependent on her is, or may be, simply the life of a minister- 
 ing angel. She does not care for herself, save as she cares for the 
 child which depends on her. Her question is not, " Is the room too hot 
 for me ? " but, "Is it too hot for him ? " It is not, "What will entertain 
 me?" but, "What will entertain him?" That measure of love is no 
 more perfect in the ministry of an angel than it is in the ministry of any 
 mother who surrenders herself to her child. So of the loyal, absorbed 
 faith of a soldier going into battle. It is not, "Shall I best shelter 
 myself here?" but, "How shall I best protect the men?" It is not, 
 "Shall I get through easiest thus?" but, "How shall I best serve the 
 cause ? " No angel or archangel in any hierarchy of God can surpass 
 that loyalty to a cause. And such faith as that, where it exists, mani- 
 fests the law, the purpose, the system of God's own heaven. Such love 
 as that mother's, such faith as that soldier's, are not to be spoken of as 
 like the heavenly qualities : they are the heavenly qualities. What 
 Jesus is trying to make us see is that heaven thus has its part and place 
 in the world of time, and may wholly master it, if we will. To bor- 
 row a striking figure which I once heard Dr. Bush employ, the earth is 
 as full of heaven as a sponge is full of water. Every pore is saturated 
 and crowded with it. And the true child of God, who knows his own 
 dignity, is not forever distinguishing between the sponge and what it 
 holds, between things of time and things of eternity. How can he dis- 
 criminate ? Both are God's work. Both are in God's order. He can 
 sweep a floor to God's glory as well as sing a psalm to his glory. As the 
 true citizen does his duty, and does it of course and without question, 
 never stopping to say, I do this as a Charlestown man, or I do this as a 
 Massachusetts man, or I do this as an American, or this as a citizen of 
 the world, but knows and feels that the one relation belongs to the 
 other, reinforces it, and gains strength from it, just so the child of GoJ 
 lives his earthly life and his heavenly life at once and together. He 
 does not define, nor dissect, nor analyze. There is no separation nor 
 distinction. He speaks at once with the tongues of men and of angels.
 
 46 EASTER. 
 
 He does the deed at once of earth and of heaven. He does his own will, 
 yes, and he does his Father's will in the same act. For he has so 
 wrought out the divinity of his own nature that his life is hid in God's 
 life. Of which union the perfect statement was made, when Jesus said, 
 "I and my Father are one." For which also he prayed for us, when 
 we prayed that we might be one, as they two are one. 
 
 Careless people sometimes express surprise when they find the same 
 man exhibiting what they call the most opposite characters, that he is 
 at once so practical and so ideal. Mr. Emerson, for instance, idealist of 
 the idealists, teaches the most obdurate common-sense in the homeliest 
 Saxon dialect. So Professor Peirce, one who could weigh one comet 
 against another in his scales, who could count the oscillations of the 
 rays of the Pleiades and untangle the cords of the attractions of Orion, 
 was, through and through, an idealist, never so much at home as when 
 he spoke of the foundations of ethics, and in most weighty phrase, ren- 
 dered homage to the truth. It is only careless people who are so sur- 
 prised. Earth being all full of heaven, the surprising thing would be 
 if this were not so. The man really practical will be thoroughly ideal. 
 The child of God truly heavenly will deal with things of time as simplv 
 and as certainly as God does. Here in your Gospels is Matthew, 
 whom you call and call rightly a man of affairs, tax-gatherer, merchant, 
 gives you your parables of usury, and buying and selling and all 
 practical affairs. Yes ; and it is he who writes down your beatitudes^ 
 with that mystic, "Blessed are [the pure in heart, for they shall see God." 
 It is he who writes, "Fear not, little flock, it is your Father's good 
 pleasure to give you the kingdom." It is he who sings, shall I say the 
 eternal song of welcome : '' Come unto me, ye that labor and are heavy- 
 laden ; and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of 
 me ; for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest to your 
 souls." So easily and certainly does a child of God find the eternal 
 truth, and speak it, in the midst of earth's affairs. 
 
 Film by film, shred by shred, this child of God lays oft* one and 
 another of the environments which fetter him. The baby is not held 
 longer in his mother's arms : he totters alone. At last, he is master of 
 the house, and may roam where he will. Nay, the day comes when the 
 doubtful mother must let him run out-doors under his own control. He
 
 INCREASE OF LIFE. ^J 
 
 grows to youth or manhood, and makes his own home. Not even 
 orders from father or mother rule him longer. Perhaps he passes from 
 land to land, acquires the sway of new languages, and is not bound 
 even to one country. Perhaps his word controls other men. What 
 he writes is read by all thinkers, what he thinks is applied in all laws. 
 Perhaps he startles a generation of sleepers, and they take up their beds 
 and walk. All this steady enlargement of life and power is certain, 
 because he is God's child. The soul in him controls muscle, nerve, 
 sense, fibre, blood-vessels, and brain. The God in him controls the 
 organic frame of an earthly tabernacle. One step more, and the sweet 
 singer, who yesterday wrote some psalm of praise for a few compan- 
 ions, casts oflfthis earthly house of a mortal tabernacle, and joins in the 
 chorus of a nobler and larger worship. 
 
 The careful reasoncr who, with the little tricks of two or three earthly 
 algebras, untangled the problems of the universe, drops off the house 
 of an earthly tabernacle, sees as he is seen and knows as he is known, 
 and rejoices in the untangled heavenly verities. The faithful friend, 
 who let no hour pass unless he had ministered to this orphan, had 
 braced up yonder hesitant, had lifted him who was fallen, or comforted 
 her who was starving, casts ofi'this frail house of an earthly tabernacle ; 
 and lo ! infinite resource with which to minister, no lack of time for 
 endeavor, and no grinding burden of fatigue. She who, for months 
 and years, lay gently on the sick-bed, who received from one and 
 another a thousand tender ministrations to her pain, and repaid them 
 all in her thankful patience, she casts off this frail house of this earthly 
 tabernacle ; and lo ! with the same love, with the same patience, with 
 the same gratitude, she is ministering to them and to ten thousand more, 
 in this glad freedom of disembodied life. As the baby passes into the 
 boy, the boy into the youth, the youth into the man, so, in one more 
 change, not unlike these others, the child of God stands free in the 
 untrammelled life of heaven. 
 
 The revelation of life in Jesus Christ is not simply the fact of his 
 personal re-appearance after death. Before he died, he had quickened 
 the life of the world, renewed it, enlarged it. "I am the resurrection and 
 the life : whoso liveth and believeth in me shall never die." Whoever 
 lives with that control of sense and organ by the living soul which to
 
 40 r , EASTER. 
 
 the Christian man is possible, whoever rises superior to pain, hunger, 
 want, whoever lives with the divine life of a son of God, that man 
 knows he does not die. The answer falls fitly on the wretched plaint 
 of Martha, dissatisfied, as well she might be, with the faith of her coun- 
 try and of her time. She sobs out her doleful creed : "I know that he 
 shall rise again, at that distant resurrection, at that last day, which is, 
 oh, so wretchedly far away ! " How often has that mournful plaint of 
 that Jewish woman been repeated by persons who have been taught 
 the same Eastern doctrine of a suspended animation, even in Christian 
 churches ! Christ will have none of it. " Dead ! Do you think I shall 
 die? You believe in me! Do you think any child of God dies? If 
 he once learns to live, if he live in the large life, the life that be- 
 lieves, that loves, that hopes, he knows he cannot die." 
 
 It is indeed a faith -which it needs such as Jesus to instill. Those who 
 knew him took it in and made it real. For us, we drink at the same 
 fountain. The promise was not an empty promise ; and when the 
 moment comes, when the cloud opens and the heaven reveals itself, the 
 Comforter, who is the Holy Spirit, speaks to us. Nor is it any new 
 doctrine. It is the word which spoke from the beginning. The Com- 
 forter speaks to say that the world of God is larger than this world of 
 man. The life of God is larger than this life, hemmed in by the pow- 
 ers of five senses only, and unable to know more or to do more. The 
 Father of perfect love is always training us for that larger life and those 
 fuller powers. Sometimes he shows us that this is possible. When 
 he calls the careful thinker who has exhausted earthly processes, or the 
 brave leader who has quickened a thousand thousand lives, nay, the 
 loving boy who has shown me what the kingdom of heaven is and what 
 it is like, or the unselfish mother whose life has been all made up 
 of help and blessing to those around her, when God lifts these into a 
 life unembodied, and therefore unseen, he teaches me again the lesson 
 which Jesus was teaching always. Such lives have larger sphere and 
 duty ; for God's purpose is larger than these cramped places and these 
 passing hours. Who lives as they have lived, and with such faith as 
 their faith, these never die.
 
 THE LAW OF CHANGE. 
 
 BY JOHN STERLING. 
 
 WHILE under heaven's warm evening hues 
 They felt their eyes and bosoms glow, 
 
 They learned how fondly fancy views 
 Fair sights the moment ere they go ; 
 
 And then, while earth was darkening o'er, 
 While stars began their tranquil day, 
 
 Rejoiced that Nature gives us more 
 Than all it ever takes away. 
 
 In earliest autumn's fading woods, 
 
 Remote from eyes, they roamed at morn, 
 
 And saw how'Time transmuting broods 
 O'er all that into Time is born. 
 
 The power which men would fain forget- 
 The law of change and slow decay 
 
 Csone to them with a mild regret, 
 A brightness veiled in softening gr&y.
 
 CONSIDER THE LILIES, 
 
 " Consider the lilies, how they grow." MATT, vi, 28. 
 
 THEY do not grow in any spasm of sudden resolution. They seem 
 to wake up, after long indifference. They seem to rush eagerly to light 
 and air, to burst into blossom as quickly as they can, and then to die. 
 But the truth is that all last year they were collecting and digesting 
 from rain and sunshine and air the material which they use in all this 
 outburst. If the bulb had not done its underground duty then, if all 
 nature in union had not done its work then, if the sun had not shone, 
 the world turned on its axis and flown through space, if the heavens 
 had not clouded and cleared, and raindrops formed and fallen, there 
 would be no lily to-day. The lily does not have to toil. It does not 
 have to spin. Worlds have moved to and fro that it might blossom, 
 rocks have been ground to powder by glacier and by the tooth of time, 
 soils have been drifted hither and thither as ages have passed by, 
 that the lily might have a place to stand, might have food to di- 
 gest, might have beauty and fragrance for your delight. What the 
 lily has done or has been in all this infinite movement is this. It 
 has accepted the universe. It has waited for its time, and then has 
 pushed its germ to the sky and its rootlets into the soil. It has not 
 tried to be a law unto itself, or to live and blossom and have a being or 
 some system of its own. 
 
 Such hint, at least for our own lives, do we gain when we consider 
 the lilies, how they grow. This is the hint which the Saviour meant 
 to give. Eager as he is that you and I shall recognize the present 
 God, shall gain from his presence just the comfort and strength that he 
 did, shall live and move and have our being in him, he asks us to con- 
 sider the lilies ; for they are trusting God, are obeying the great law or 
 nature in which they have their place and their duty. On the one hand, 
 
 (50)
 
 CONSIDER THK LILIES. $ I 
 
 they do not exaggerate their duty. Therefore, their days are not made 
 wretched by toil. They do their part. On the other hand, they do 
 not sulk nor compel attendant slaves to clothe them in such robes as the 
 servants of Solomon brought him. They do their part, but that part is 
 not toil. It is not abject. It is clear enough that the lily enjoys its life 
 with all the heart and soul it has. It does its little part gladly, and 
 from the Infinite Love and Infinite Beauty it accepts the rest. Here is 
 our lesson. 
 
 ' In the great jubilee of spring-time, which with us takes form as 
 Easter, and which takes some fit form in all religious systems, men do 
 not simply celebrate the new life of the world. They are sure to add 
 to that recognition their praise of the beauty and glory of the world. 
 It is that feeling which heaps up your roses on the communion table, 
 and brings to me in the pulpit here the annual glory of my pansies and 
 the sweet, timid blush of my blood-root. Scepticism has found, in our 
 time, a coarse and hard reply to the statement that the firmament shows 
 God's hand-work. "You must not say that, because the \vorld is, 
 God is." This is the statement. " For if the world were not, you 
 would not be, and you could not be arguing. This is what has hap- 
 pened to survive, under the law of selection, in which no one selects." 
 Kut no such reply annoys me, no such doubt perplexes me, when I 
 have in my hand a spring anemone, or a sweet violet, or the lily of the 
 field. The world could have existed without either of them. The 
 great dice-box of Destiny could have flung out its worlds into space, 
 with no fragrant violet, with no wind-blown anemone, with lio lily of 
 the field, and the balance of gravitation would still have been perfect, 
 the world would have rushed without fragrance and beauty wildly 
 through space. When in the same blossom my eye now revels in 
 color, when I find exquisite form and perfect grace, as I enjoy the 
 fragrance with the color and the form, you find it hard to persuade me 
 that this is the survival of the fittest. When I find the dice always 
 turn up triplets, I am sure that some conscious Power loaded them. 
 Whatever power made rose and lily, and violet and anemone, had the 
 sense of beauty and knew what my sense of beauty would be. So that 
 I find the exquisite rhodora waiting for me in the wilderness, I say 
 gladly, it is my spontaneous thought, " The self-same Power that 
 brought me here brought you."
 
 52 EASTER. 
 
 I think I have told the story here of one of my college teachers who 
 joined me one evening in Cambridge, when I was returning from some 
 long tramp, with full store in my tin box of wild flowers which had 
 been opening for me and waiting for me. With an air of reproach, the 
 learned man said to me that he wished he also knew something of flowers, 
 but that, when he was of my age, he was wholly occupied in the care 
 and cure of his soul, and had no heart or time for such things. " Now 
 I have all that settled," he said, with some self-respect, " I wish I knew 
 something of botany." 
 
 I w r as too young, and I trust too modest, to reply. But I know now, 
 what I suspected then, that that man was a fool. I know now that I could 
 have put my soul into no better training than it would gain in a fresh 
 walk under God's open sky, while I was exulting in the dainty delicacy 
 of his work and enjoying the lavish exuberance of the love which cares 
 for all of us. True, I had gone for my flowers from " native impulse." 
 I had never analyzed my motive nor made it matter of study. I went 
 because I w r anted to. I liked to do that much more than I liked to 
 read Bickersteth's Christian Student or Doddridge's Rise and Prog- 
 ress, which my friend would have wished me to be reading. And I 
 believe, what I do not pretend to prove, that that native joy came to me 
 thus, because the Power that put the flowers here put me here, because 
 his life is in all his works, and that his children, of whom I am 
 one, come closer to him as they know more and more of his handiwork 
 and enjoy what he enjoys, as they watch the present life in which his 
 creatures live and move and have their being. I say the present life 
 in which they are now growing. God is : his name is I Am. It is not per- 
 haps easy to think of him as acting now, with just the thought and feel- 
 ing \vith which the poet says he acted in the beginning, when God said, 
 ' l Let the earth bring forth grass." But it ought not to be impos- 
 sible. God now says, " Let the earth bring forth grass." He /.> 
 saying it at this instant ; and, because he is saying it at this 
 instant, the earth is bringing forth grass at this instant. Just 
 the same creation is going forward now which, for convenience 
 of language, we say went forward then, in what, for convenience 
 of language, we call the beginning. Perhaps one feels this present 
 power of a present God a little more vividly when one sees it in a;i 
 unaccustomed way. I have told the story here of one of our first men
 
 CONSIDER THE LILIES. 53 
 
 of science, of whom it would be fair to say that he experienced relig- 
 ion, though not for the first time, indeed, when he first put his eye 
 to the eye-piece of a compound microscope of high power. In that 
 moment, he was a witness, at least, of the present work of God, see- 
 ing crystals shape themselves, seeing cells enlarge and double and 
 separate, seeing growth in what seems to be its origin. In truth, 
 there is nothing more remarkable when I see an atom, just now 
 invisible, choose its conscious course and work its way across a tiny 
 drop, than there is when I see an eagle mount in the sky, poise himself 
 in mid-heaven, and plunge in the deep below. In both cases, I see an 
 exertion of spontaneous will ; and that is always unexplainable. But, 
 when I see this through the microscope, the sight shocks my dead 
 habit ; and I feel that God is now as he was in the beginning, and as he 
 ever will be, world without end. 
 
 " I Am is thy memorial still." Fortunately for me, I said something 
 like this in preaching in England two years ago ; and, fortunately for me, 
 one of the first naturalists of our time happened to hear me. He was 
 kind enough to stop after the service and introduce himself to me, and 
 make an appointment with me, that with my eyes I might see some of 
 these marvels in a world which in our language is small, while in other 
 languages it may be as great as to us is the world of Arcturus and of 
 Orion. Of the marvels which that day he showed me, that which I 
 find stands out in my memory most distinctly is the home which a little 
 creature builds for itself from specks of quartz sand at the cbpth ot 
 about a mile beneath the surface of the ocean. Of these little creatures 
 there are thousands of varieties. When their spring-time comes to 
 them in their dark home, whatever that spring-time may be, thesj littlj 
 creatures build for themselves their houses or their nests, each in his 
 fashion, just as the sparrow builds his nest in one fashion truler my 
 piazza, and the hang-bird builds his in my elm-tree in another. To 
 speak only of one of them, whose house I saw from every point .of view, 
 he chooses t"> select for its material only the finest quartz sand, from the 
 varied material of the bottom of the ocean. The whole house, wlvjti it 
 is done, is about the size of the head of the smallest pin. For this 
 there are needed something like one million atoms of the sand. These 
 atoms are formed in a perfect sphere, with a little neck at the top, like 
 the short, open neck of a flask. The atoms are of every conceivable
 
 54 EASTKK. 
 
 shape, .and precisely resemble under the microscope the stones in a wall 
 in a New England pasture. And precisely as a skilful workman will 
 fit those stones together, so that the cracks between them shall be the 
 smallest possible, precisely as he makes one side of his wall smooth or 
 flat, while he is indifferent to the other side, and leaves it jagged and 
 uneven, so does this little creature work, in building the little gourd- 
 shaped bottle which is his home. The outside is as smooth as possi- 
 ble, the inside is rough, as might happen from the shape of the stones 
 he handled. How much the little creature knows I cannot tell. But, 
 like the lily, he knows the law of the universe in which he lives : he 
 makes himself a part of that universe, he accepts its conditions and does 
 his share. I believe he does it consciously. I believe he does it because 
 he wishes to do it. If he does, he also is a fellow-workman together 
 with God. 
 
 I grant the exceeding difficulty of thinking, feeling, believing, and 
 seeing that God is a spirit. I am afraid that difficulty will yet last for 
 generations. The woman felt it at Sychar, when Jesus said, " God is 
 a Spirit" ; and her brothers and sisters have felt it ever since, and will 
 continue to feel it for a long time. Even the language of the best books 
 does not always help us. Thus, the Bible language and the hymns 
 drawn from it often run back to the child's notion, which was the ear- 
 lier Jewish notion, that God lives in a particular place, that he waits for 
 this message, and that he sends that angel. But, in this great business 
 which is central, everything makes one hopeful now. All science 
 shows more and more one law in all space and in all time. Whatever 
 Power made this world, the same Power sustains it, made and sustains 
 Arcturus and Orion. To this Power there is no such limitation as 
 Space, there is no such limitation as Time. Now, about this Present 
 Power, you may have two notions. According as you have one notion, 
 you may call it " It," and say, " It does not know what it is doing." 
 Or you may call this power " He." and you may say, " He does know 
 what he is doing." In this last case, you accept the religious philoso- 
 phy of Jesus Christ. As you consider the lilies, you see in them the 
 tokens of God's present love and of his present wish that this world 
 among other worlds may be beautiful and happy. To take Miss Fuller's 
 phrase, which I used before, you " accept the universe." To take the
 
 CONSIDER THE LILIES. 55 
 
 quaint phrase of the catechism, you "enjoy God." Best of all, per- 
 haps, is the phrase of the parable, you " enter into the joy of your 
 Lord." 
 
 I certainly am not going to argue in five minutes this great question, 
 whether the Power which sustains this universe is He or is It ; whether 
 He be conscious of his work or not. Indeed, I do not think that ques- 
 tion will ever be solved by argument. Rather, I believe that a world of 
 the conscious children of this God steadily moves forward and upward 
 to its own solution of the question, and with every day, indeed, of the 
 world's life, knows him more and knows him better. " Nearer, my 
 God, to Thee, nearer to Thee." In this great issue, I like Dr. George 
 Putnam's epigram. "You say that all this beauty, wisdom, tender- 
 ness, harmony, are the result of certain laws of matter, which you tell 
 me are one law. I accept your conclusion. I believe what you say, 
 only with a little change of language. If Matter can do such wonders 
 as these, wonders which in my highest spiritual flight I enjoy and prize, 
 I find it better to call it Spirit. What you call Matter I call Spirit." 
 Or, as a matter of statement, I have found many people are helped by 
 Freeman Clarke's simple statement, which I wish I could repeat in his 
 own clear language. " You say that this exquisite human organization in 
 which a million million cells of being cooperate with each other for one 
 aim has resulted in the marvel of thought, in the marvel of conscious 
 being, and in the greater marvels of faith and hope and love. You tell 
 me it is possible for a bit of mechanism to be so exquisitely perfect that 
 the result is conscious life ; as if the beautiful organ yonder were so 
 marvellously formed that of itself, without direction, it should begin, 
 when it chose, to play a symphony more marvellous than Beethoven 
 ever dreamed of, and, when it chose, should cease and be still. Very- 
 well. If mechanism can thus rise to consciousness in man, why may 
 not the mechanism and harmony of your universe rise to consciousness 
 as well ? Why might not all the stars of the morning sing together, 
 when they heard all the sons of men shouting for joy ? " I acknowl- 
 edge that these are not arguments : they are simply statements in 
 language, by two clear-headed men, not apt to deceive themselves in a 
 matter -where they would not argue. I quote them, because 1 think 
 what is needed most is to rescue the language in which we speak of
 
 56 EASTER. 
 
 God, the Infinite Spirit, from the language in which children might 
 speak, or savages, the language of idol worshippers or of those who 
 imprison God in a visible form. Let me just say this, and it shall be 
 all. There is to me something amazing in that presumption which I 
 meet now and then in the reviews, which really supposes that the thou- 
 sand million men, more or less, who live in visible bodies in this little 
 world, are the only conscious beings in the infinite universe. It was 
 absurd enough, in the days of men's ignorance, to suppose that sun, 
 moon, planets, and stars all circled around this little globe of ours, 
 absurd enough to suppose that sun and moon were set only to give us 
 light, and that stars were set in constellations only that men might 
 exult in their beauty. But this absurdity is nothing to the arrogant inso- 
 lence of the presumption which tells me that, while I am conscious of 
 my existence here and look back with interest on my past and with 
 curiosity on my future, the Power which makes me and sustains me, 
 orders the sun to paint the lily for me and bids the lily grow to be 
 painted, is not conscious of his past, is not conscious of his present work, 
 and is not curious about his future. This arrogance reaches its climax, 
 when we are told, as we so often are, that we men, forsooth, who are 
 the lords of creation, are indeed its only conscious inhabitants, so many 
 Alexander Selkirks, indeed, stranded on the edge of a desert. 
 
 " I am monarch of all I survey. 
 My reign there is none to dispute." 
 
 But I did not ask you to consider the lilies, that I might engage in 
 this high argument which is, as I suppose, beyond logical reasoning. 
 I wanted to say enough, this morning, shall I say, to justify our instinct- 
 ive passion for flowers, and gardening, and nature, and the woods. I 
 want to do honor to that nerve of the eternal life which runs through it 
 all, and makes its joy part, indeed, and element of the joy of God. This 
 is no poor bit of the pleasure of sense alone. The passion that takes 
 you out of doors is not one of the vulgar, selfish, or personal passions 
 which Puritans were right in holding under lock and key. Here is the 
 child of God who wants to know what his Father is doing. His own 
 life quickens and warms and grows young as days grow longer and the 
 sun rides higher, and it is in his godly nature and by one of the divine 
 laws that he delights to see how other creatures of God are break- 
 ing from their wintry prison. Life seeks life and loves life. In the
 
 CONSIDER THE LILIES. 57 
 
 opening of a catkin of a willow, in the flight of the butterfly, in the 
 chirping of a tree-toad or the sweep of an eagle, my life loves to see how 
 others live, exults in their joy and so far is partner in their great con- 
 cern. And this is really what we mean when we say, what I think 
 people generally understand, that a man is apt to be nearer to God when 
 he is out of doors than when he is in his home. Literally, this might not 
 be true. But what we are after is the larger Life. We do not want to 
 be limited wholly by things of the flesh, what we shall eat, what we 
 shall drink. After these things, the Gentiles seek, the Philistines, most 
 of all. What we do need is more of God. It may be some sudden and 
 new hint of him, it may be the infinite and perpetual lesson of the ocean 
 or of the stars. Always it is Life, life larger than a room, life larger 
 than a day. It was when he got outside a room that the first man, 
 in the cool of the day, walked with God. And for us, in these later 
 days, it is that we may walk with God, more and more often, that the 
 Saviour bids us " consider the lilies."
 
 LUTHER'S EASTER HYMN. 
 
 IN the bonds of Death He lay 
 
 Who for our offence was slain ; 
 But the Lord is risen to-day, 
 
 Christ hath brought us life again. 
 Wherefore let us all rejoice, . 
 Singing loud with cheerful voice. 
 Hallelujah ! 
 
 Of the sons of men, was none 
 
 Who could break the bonds of Death ; 
 Sin this mischief dire had done ; 
 
 Innocent was none on earth, 
 Wherefore Death grew strong and bold, 
 Would all men in his prison hold. 
 Hallelujah ! 
 
 Jesus Christ, God's only Son, 
 
 Came at last our foe to smite, 
 All our sins away hath done, 
 
 Done away Death's power and might. 
 Only the form of Death is left, 
 Of his sting he is bereft, 
 Hallelujah ! 
 
 That was a wondrous war, I trow, 
 
 When Life and Death together fought, 
 
 But Life hath triumph'd o'er his foe. 
 Death is mock'd and set at naught. 
 (58)
 
 LUTHER'S EASTER HYMN. 59 
 
 'T is even as the Scripture saith, 
 Christ through death has conquer'd Death ; 
 Hallelujah ! 
 
 The rightful Paschal Lamb is He, 
 
 On whom alone we all must live, 
 Who to death upon the tree, 
 
 Himself in wondrous love did give. 
 Faith strikes His blood upon the door. 
 Death fell, and dares not harm us more. 
 Hallelujah ! 
 
 Let us keep high festival 
 
 On this most blessed day of days, 
 When God his mercy showed to all ; 
 
 Our Sun is risen with brightest rays, 
 And our dark hearts rejoice to see 
 Sin and night before Him flee. 
 Hallelujah ! 
 
 To the supper of the Lord, 
 
 Gladly will we come to-day ; 
 The word of peace is now restored, 
 
 The old leaven is put away. 
 Christ will be our food alone. 
 Faith no life but His doth own. 
 Hallelujah !
 
 EASTER, 
 
 " Because I live, ye shall live also." JOHN xiv, 19. 
 
 THE sects in the Church might be judged by a comparison of their 
 favorite holidays. And so might eras in history be judged. It is matter 
 of real interest, then, to see how all poets and prophets of all divisions 
 of the Church unite on this day, to proclaim it the Sunday of Sundays, 
 the High Holy Day of the year. For this is to say that poet and proph- 
 et, of every sect and those least sectarian, have found out at last that 
 the Christian Religion stands for Life. Life instead of form ; Life in- 
 stead of Laws ; Life instead of Grave-clothes ; Life instead of Tombs ; 
 Life instead of Death ; that is what Christianity means, and what it is 
 for. You would be tempted to say that the Saviour had already enforced 
 this completely in what he said to men ; tempted to say that Easter 
 morning was not needed either for illustration or enforcement. Certain- 
 ly the gospel texts are full of the lesson. " Because I live, ye shall live 
 also." " As the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son 
 to have life in himself." " This is Life Eternal to believe on thee." 
 And central text of all, the text we have chosen for the motto of this 
 church, " I have come that they might have life, and that they might 
 have it more abundantly." If texts alone ever did anything, these and 
 a thousand more would show what The Truth is, and The Way. But 
 one is tempted, in bitter moods, to say that texts never do anything, that 
 words never achieve or finish anything. One is tempted to remember 
 how he said that any man who prepared God's way is greater than any 
 man who only proclaims it, how prophets and prophesying were done 
 with, mere talk was over praise the Lord ! and energy, action, force 
 had come in instead, praise the Lord ! Yet, if anybody did still trust in 
 talk, he might take a lesson from these Gospels. 
 
 (60)
 
 EASTER. 6l 
 
 Here are all these people, high and low, on tenter-hooks of excitement 
 and curiosity. " What has this man to teach ? Where will that man take 
 us? What is this Judas the Gaulonite after? What has that Edomite 
 to propose ? What will Theudas promise ? " John Baptist comes in. 
 "Who is he? Is he Elijah? Has he any plan? Has he any word? 
 There is a Nazarene up at Capernaum. Nobody ever talked like him, 
 and he has made a blind man see. Let us go and find him." They 
 come swarming up around him, block the streets, block the roads, press 
 over the houses, where he is at meat, to ask him what he proposes. 
 L_What does he propose ? Life ! That those who are dead shall live. 
 That people shall pray for themselves, who have been praying by proxy. 
 That people shall pray where they are, who have been going to Jerusa- 
 lem to worship. That people shall do themselves what they have been 
 expecting others to do. That people shall enter heaven now, which they 
 have been supposing should wait for them after ages of aeons. God is 
 yours, Heaven is yours, if you would only Live. Why, if you had as 
 much life in you as this grain of mustard seed has, you would share God's 
 own power, and live in God's own heaven ! For God is Here, and God 
 is Now. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. Life ! That is what he 
 proposes. 
 
 These words* even dimly echoed, shake the ages. If words alone 
 were worth much, you would say that they must have touched to the 
 heart the men who heard them, the women and the children. I do not 
 say, but in a fashion, they did touch them. But what appeared on the 
 surface was, that when he said some such words, this group of his hear- 
 ers would say, " Can't you show us a miracle, as you showed the people 
 of Nain?" and that set of people would say, " Can't you feed us here on 
 the grass, as you fed us last week by the lake-side?" and these near 
 friends would say, u Cannot you make me Senator and cannot you make 
 me a Publican, when you come into your kingdom, and have offices to 
 fill ? " " Life ! Yes, that sounds all very well in sermons, and when one 
 is making a platform, but, as between friends, other things are to be con- 
 sidered." So that, so far as appears, the applause of the multitudes, and 
 the crowded streets of Capernaum, of Tiberias and of Jericho, never ad- 
 vanced the real kingdom by the breadth of one hair. 
 
 I do not think it would be fanciful, as it certainlv would not be dif-
 
 O2 KASTER. 
 
 ficult, to describe the different set of people among those who surrounded 
 him, who, from one prejudice or other, or from one or another one- 
 sidedness, missed the reality, Life, and took from him and his words 
 something less which they could have taken from earthen vessels. 
 
 1 . There were mere sentimentalists, who were so passionately in love 
 with him, that they must be always kissing the hem of his garment, or 
 sitting in his shadow. They were worthless when he was out of sight, 
 they were useless when he sent them on an errand. If he said firmly, 
 " I must go away," they were not simply in tears, they were prostrate 
 and wretched ; and when he went away, in truth, it proved that they had 
 not found out what the word ki Life " means. That type of people ex- 
 ists in the church to this hour. 
 
 2. Then there were the " Doctrinaires" shall I call them, the peo- 
 ple with the ink-horns and note-books, the " scribes and lawyers." 
 They knew what he said on the second day of Nisan, and they could com- 
 pare it with what he said on the li second Sabbath after the First." " I 
 tell you he said, ' He that is not against us is on our side.' I have it 
 written down here." " I don't care for that, he certainly said, ' He that 
 is not with me is against me.' He said it, that day we ate our lunch by 
 the tamarisk tree. Here are my notes." ' ; I am sure he said, ' A proph- 
 et is without honor except in his own country,' here 1 are the words." 
 " What do I care for your words? Perhaps you do not read your notes 
 right. Now mine are perfectly plain. ' A prophet is not without hon- 
 or, except in his own country.' He said it to Simon the Smith, when 
 we met him at Bethany." These are the people who lost sight of Life 
 in the Letter. The same type of people exist in the church to-day. 
 Jesus tried to silence them, but he 'did not silence them by what he said 
 of jots and tittles. Paul tried to do the same, when he said, " The Let- 
 ter killeth, and the Spirit giveth Life." If woids had been worth more 
 we should never have heard of them again. 
 
 3. Then there was another set of people, whom I might call the im- 
 itative people, who were very precise about method. " Did you see 
 John Baptist with him at the Jordan? Then you can tell us all about 
 it? How deep did they go into the water? Did John take his hand, 
 or did he take a shell, when he baptized him? " " You are quite sure 
 that he did not wash his hands before he went into Matthew's dinner par- 
 ty? " " Yes, quite sure." " Remember that, Salome, he did not wash
 
 EASTKR. 63 
 
 his hands, be sure you remember." " Are you sure he ate quail on the 
 Fast-day ? " "I am perfectly sure, my sister saw him." " You are sure 
 it was not after sun-down ? " " After sun-down ? Oh, no ! the sun was 
 an hour high." " Remember, Salome, could you not write it down? 
 The sun was an hour high." " You say they rubbed the corn in their 
 hands?" " Certainly they rubbed it in their hands." " Had they no linen 
 cloth to rub it in ? " " No. There was no cloth at all." " Salome, write 
 that down. Corn eaten on the Sabbath day is not to be rubbed in a linen 
 cloth, it is to be rubbed in the hands." 
 
 These are the people who lose Life in their anxiety for form. You see 
 I do not exaggerate. Just that class of Christians, such as they are, ex- 
 ist to-day, and make up large sections of the church, if we could believe, 
 as, thank God, we cannot, the technical classifications. 
 
 In the midst of all this folly, Jesus moved as simply and as omnipo- 
 tently as Orion moves across a winter sky, careless of cloud, careless of 
 gust of snow, careless of smoke or dust, careless of whirlwinds. If 
 people see him, well ; if they do not see him, so much the worse for them. 
 No matter, he is the same. Let them take or make this lesson or that 
 lesson, he is the same. Life and Eternal Life that is what he stands 
 for. God with Man. The Eternal Life of the Unchanging God in the 
 Human Form and in the midst of Earth's surroundings! 
 
 Yes, my friends, and so we ask naturally, " Do we see him ? " But even 
 that is of no consequence, he tells us, in comparison with this. " Are 
 we alive?" Nay, that question itself deceives us. Are we even sure 
 that we know what the word Life means? There is a description, some- 
 where, of the new emotion, the new senses, the new joy, the wild, strange 
 surprise, with which an imaginative man, new-made, saw sunrise and 
 its glories, drank in the freshness of morning and the luxury of day for 
 the first time, ready to sing as Adam sang, 
 
 " These are thy glorious gifts, Father of all." 
 
 " How could it be for the first time ? " says some Nicodemus. " Could 
 he enter again into his mother's womb and be born ? " It was for the 
 first time, because in the reckless habits of those days in Kentucky, where 
 this man lived, he. could not remember till now the night when he had 
 not gone to sleep the worse for liquor, so that he could not remember till 
 now the morning when he had waked fresh and pure and able to enjoy.
 
 64 EASTER. 
 
 Not till now, when some apostle of the Word of God had made him 
 fling oft" that old bondage and enabled him in that one detail of life, to 
 see, and feel, and hear, and understand. Now that man, till that miracle 
 was wrought, did not know what the word morning meant. His defi- 
 nition of it was inadequate. His sense of it was all incomplete. If he 
 had talked with a true artist about it, or a simple child, or a pure 
 woman, he would not have known what the words meant which they 
 used. He would have said they were talking rhetoric, that they were 
 exaggerating, " that they were lying to him." He would always have 
 said this, till the blessed moment when he was born again so that he 
 could see for himself, and hear and know and understand. And that 
 fatuity and ignorance is only a little type or illustration, in a single de- 
 tail, of our inability from ignorance to use the word Life at all, in the 
 sense in which Jesus used it, until and unless we have boldly entered in- 
 to Life, as he said to the young gentleman of Edom. There is no 
 " book of the opera " of Life which will tell you how charming it is to 
 see it. There is no transparency in front of the show, which will answer 
 the purpose for you to look upon. You must push the door open and 
 go in. There is no way in which you can read the play, and feel it and 
 understand it, as if you had been one of the actors. No ! It is to no 
 such sham or imitation that your Father invites you. " Here is my 
 home," he says, " come into my house." " Here is my feast," he says, 
 44 come sit at my feast." " Here is Life Eternal. Oh, my children, 
 because you are my children, Live while you live." 
 
 That is what God says to us, by every voice of his. It is what he 
 says this day, of all days, by his son, Well Beloved. What we say, is 
 of little consequence. But what we determine and do, is of great con- 
 sequence to ourselves, if to nobody beside ! It is as nothing to us 
 whether we see the risen Saviour or not. Many who did see him did 
 not profit by what they saw. It is as nothing to us, whether we believe 
 he were Son of God, if all this time we are acting as if we were not 
 God's children. To state this in the familiar woi'ds of the Old Theology, 
 one of the most distinguished Baptist preachers a few weeks since 
 described the incarnation of God in Christ, with intense earnestness, 
 and therefore intense power. Then, to the great assembly, which fol- 
 lowed him eagerly in his demonstration that God was in the flesh
 
 K ASTER. 65 
 
 speaking to the world by Christ Jesus he said, " This is nothing to 
 you unless you dare say this day that God is Incarnate in you." Per- 
 fectly true ! jJThe Resurrection miracle is nothing to you and me, if it is 
 only an event of eighteen centuries by-gone. Unless we can Live the 
 Immortal Life, unless we can receive God to his own Home in these 
 Hearts of ours, the texts are nothing to us unless these daily lives 
 illustrate them. Parable is nothing unless the Good Samaritan bends 
 in these streets over the bleeding traveller ; unless in your home, the 
 tender father can receive the returning prodigal ! For all that wealth 01 
 miracle, of precept and of example was never lived out, merely that we 
 might have one more frieze of old-time ornament to be sculptured on the 
 upper walls of our temples. Miracle was wrought, parable invented, 
 sermon preached, yes, and the cross was borne, that this world might be 
 lifted from the groveling existence of brutes to the nobler life of men : 
 that you and I, that he and she, that all men everywhere might truly 
 Live ! And the Festival of to-day, if it is anything but a tawdry lie, 
 or the Great Marvel which it celebrates, if it is anything but an inex- 
 plicable curiosity of history, mean both alike, that you and I are 
 pledged anew to-day, and covenant anew to-day, that for us we will 
 live the life of the Living children of a Living God. 
 
 To cite another word from another of the great preachers, our neigh- 
 bor Mr. John Weiss : 
 
 ki It is one thing to believe in immortality. It is quite another thing 
 to live as an immortal." 
 
 This pledge means for a church, that is for an organization of Christ- 
 ian men and women, that it will do what God has to do, in the place 
 where he has planted it. To say it would do what Christ would have 
 done, is only an effort to make the other statement more real. It is his 
 representative. It claims to be God's own beloved child. This church 
 because its Easter Festival is real undertakes this day in the echoes of 
 its music, and before its flowers have withered, to comfort those that 
 mourn, to heal those that are broken-hearted, to open the eyes that are 
 blind, and to speak God's love to those who have not heard it, to pro- 
 claim glad tidings indeed, to the poor. 
 
 And each child of God here, immortal, never-flying, begins a new 
 life to-day. It is to be a life which enjoys every blessing of God's love. 
 
 It is to be a life which trusts in his infinite power.
 
 66 EASTER. 
 
 It is to be a life which treads under foot and despises the rags of 
 Cerement which the Earth has worn. 
 
 It is to be a life which spends and is spent, in the service of Truth, 
 Holiness, and Love. 
 
 It is to be a life in which each man lives for each other man, because 
 each man lives for the purpose of the Living God. 
 
 It is a life, therefore, which with every new day, is new born. From 
 every night's sleep it starts as from an Easter Sepulchre. With every 
 new day's opportunities, it steps forward as serene and cheerful as an 
 archangel to his mission. Why worry one's self .about the past, about a 
 tomb? Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here. lie 
 is Risen ! ~\
 
 GOOD FROM EVIL. 
 
 BY JOHN STERLING. 
 
 THOU God, so rulest ; such the plan 
 Of endless change, evolving good. 
 
 Thou leadest thus desponding man 
 With hope on all thy works to brood. 
 
 In all to see an endless will 
 For all educing light and life, 
 
 The blessings born from seeming ill 
 And peace the end assured of strife. 
 
 
 
 So thou in me, O God ! ordain 
 
 That quiet faith and gladness pure 
 O'er all convulsions past may reign. 
 And root my soul in Thee secure. 
 
 So haggard wrecks of former woe 
 Beneath thy radiant light may shine, 
 
 And charmed to steadfast being show 
 O'er all their havoc bliss divine !
 
 THE MIRACLE OF LIFE, 
 
 I TRIED last Sunday to state in words the relation, so close, of all 
 Spiritual Being and all Spiritual Life. Words stumble and break 
 down in the effort. But every Religious service is one effort more 
 to express in some way man's certainty of his hold on God, and this is 
 man's certainty that his own Life is allied to the Life of the Universe. 
 
 Because this is so, Religious service fails, or is apt to fail, when it 
 occupies itself with things which are not alive. Of course the effort is, 
 to make these things the medium for expressing to God what man 
 would say. Thus the shepherd in Hebron, Abraham's neighbor, has a 
 beautiful lamb or sheep, and he knows that from the love of God and 
 his present care come flock, and grass which feeds the flock, and dew 
 and rain which water the grass, and the daily sunshine which makes 
 the whole rejoice. Because he knows this, and because he is grateful, 
 he brings to the altar this pet lamb and offers it for his sacrifice. It is 
 exactly as the children in a great school might select the best drawings 
 which they had made, or perhaps even write some copies of verses, to 
 send to the benefactor who has endowed the school and has given them 
 power to write or to draw so well. Such is the origin of sacrifice as a 
 method or form of worship. But, as time goes on, as most men do 
 something else than thus take care of sheep or oxen, as in more savage 
 days all men did, the thing comes between the child and his Father. 
 The sacrifice does not express life. It rather expresses death, and so 
 that form of worship gives way. You and I would say the same thing 
 of the use of incense in worship. The curling smoke and the pervading 
 odor, in their clay seemed to express and so did express what Mr. Mont- 
 gomery calls 
 
 " The motion of a hidden fire 
 That trembles in the breast." 
 
 So far and so long was the use of incense a fit help in worship, and for 
 
 (68)
 
 THE MIRACLE OF LIFE. 69 
 
 some people it is so now. But for others, the mechanism of the censer, 
 the swinging of the box, the providing the gums, are but a material 
 matter, and the rite is worthless. Spoken language in worship cannot 
 pretend to be free from the same difficulty. The vibration of the air, 
 which we call sound, is after all a movement of matter. It is possible, 
 therefore, that words, hymns, liturgies and rituals which once lived, 
 which expressed the living love of the living child for the living God, 
 shall become dead because they become mechanical. Mr. Edison 
 would make for us a phonograph which could be run by clock-work 
 and would repeat for us the whole Greek liturgy of St. Andrew or St. 
 James, though there were not a child of God within a hundred miles. 
 And I am afraid that you and I have heard what were called prayers, 
 uttered by the subtler mechanism of the human lips, but which ex- 
 pressed as little of that living love of a living child for a living Father. 
 And so of the central place which music occupies in worship. Music 
 holds that central place because it is infinite on one side, and Unite on 
 the other ; because it is so far indefinite in the aspiration which it ex- 
 presses ; because each waiting soul can use it almost as he will. From 
 the same strains one life takes comfort, one takes hope, one takes in- 
 struction. But music also depends upon these vibrations of the air. and 
 from godless lips and godless hearts and godless lives, music also is 
 but a bit of the mechanism of things. 
 
 Now the business of public worship as it is the business of private 
 praver and communion is to make life more alive. When we come 
 here, or when we go into the closet to pray, it is that the life within us 
 may be stronger to control this mechanism of things. That is to say. 
 Religion must magnify the soul which rules, rather than the Ixxly which 
 obeys, must turn to the Got! who creates whenever she speaks of the 
 world which is created. Because language is material, it is easier to 
 look the other way, and to do the other tiling. It is easier for men to 
 look on the- dust, from which God made them, and in their vulgar way to 
 talk to death and decay. I do not know what else fills literature with the 
 cheap sensation which is always produced by the coarsest description 
 of a death-bed. I do not know why else even the writers for children 
 gloat over the tales of sickness and other failures of the flesh. Fo.- t'u- 
 uses of such writers a dying dog seems better than a living lion. . V.<1
 
 70 EASTER. 
 
 just as the hateful gossip of a village goes round delighted if she can 
 tell you of the ravages of a new epidemic, and is fairly balked when 
 you can prove to her that the sufferers have recovered, so even the pul- 
 pit and the other voices of the church sink into the carnal habit of whin- 
 ing about sin and failure and misery, about sickness and death, about 
 disease of body, mind and soul with a kind of gusto of delight. As if 
 innocence, courage, and virtue, faith, hope and love were not the essential 
 and central subjects of their lessons, to which lapse and disease are only 
 incidental and secondary ! In a sectarian newspaper the other day I 
 saw a book criticised as unchristian, because its effort was only to show 
 the Christian victories of faith and hope and love. It seemed, forsooth, 
 that it ought to have told how wretched its hero was before he was con- 
 verted, and from what depths of misery Christ had saved him. Then, 
 and only then, according to this critic, would it have a truly religious 
 savor. 
 
 Against all this heathenism and earth worship, Easter, the Holiday 
 of Life, makes the annual protest ; against the habit of considering the 
 machinery ; against the microscopic analysis which is satisfied with 
 grovelling in the dust ; against the morbid pursuit of studving disease in- 
 stead of health ; against the cloister notion that tears are more virtuous 
 than smiles. Easter day reminds us that the Son of Man was Son of 
 God as well. It reminds us that as God's children ive have privilege of 
 godly life and godly communion. .It lifts us for the day. it would fain 
 lift us for the year, from dwelling among the graves. 
 
 The last account given of the successive steps in the history of man's 
 body, suggests that the ancestor of all men now living was probably a 
 Marine Ascidian, which is to say a sea-worm, living in an amphibious 
 life on the edge of the sea, now washed by the rising tide, and then left 
 to try experiments with air. It is supposed that the frame of man, by 
 successive improvements and gradations, has been enlarged and uplifted 
 by that Power which controls the world, till now man stands erect 
 
 "And is able to look upon the heavens." 
 
 Grant that this is so. At the beginning of this career the sea-worm 
 which you sav was our ancestor was alive. There was that life which
 
 THE MIRACLE OF LIFE. Jl 
 
 enabled him to wish, to strive, and within the limits of his being to do 
 what he chose. Life. will, choice, desire. These did not come to him 
 'rom the tides. These were no product of his daily food. They en- 
 ;.bled him in his poor way to use the tides, and to purvey for his sub- 
 sistence. They made him in his wav. lord of the earth, the sea. and of 
 mere things. And all your chemistry and all your analysis will never 
 show you what this Life is. which rules over things, and rules them with 
 the absolute empire which every day is witness to. Such are the little 
 types of Life's victory. Even the opening of these flowers is such a 
 type of it ; the new carol of the birds of spring is a type of it ; the green 
 on the hill-side is a type of it. Life, which is inexplicable to the 
 student of things, life, which controls and uses things, is asserted in all 
 these spring-time miracles. And when one looks at the noblest victories 
 of all. as when one sees St. Vincent working at the galley oar that he 
 may help the poor slaves who are chained at his side, when one sees 
 Ridley dying at the stake that other men mav know what is the truth 
 for which he dies, nay,|_whenever one reads anything noble, glad, and 
 great in the history of the world, he finds another of the victories which 
 Easter morning commemorates. The victory of the soul over matter. 
 The sway of the Spirit over things. The victory of Life over things 
 which rust and decay. The victory of Life which is Eternal over Death, 
 which is only an aspect of Time and a Delusion. 
 
 The joyous celebration of Easter is not simply the commemoration of 
 the rolling away of the rock from the Sepulchre. It is the celebration 
 of every triumph of the Eternal and Infinite soul of man.' A celebration, 
 then, well worth cherishing in an age which is a little too proud of its 
 success in raking over dust heaps, and putting labels on the treasures it 
 finds in tiiem. If we enter into the spirit of the celebration it will help 
 us, as I believe George Herbert says, to look upward more in all this 
 new-born year and to look downward less. It will tempt us in the 
 midst of our study of things and our analysis of their forms, to study even 
 with more eagerness the history of man. and the triumphs over things ot 
 the living soul, the child of God. Of course we shall be curious about 
 God's handiwork, curious about the palace in w ioh man the immortal 
 lives. But unless we are fools, our interest in the palace, in its carvings, 
 its fret work, its pictures or its dirt and ashes will not so engross us.
 
 JZ EASTER. 
 
 but we shall look to see and listen to hear if he who inhabits the palace, 
 if the Sovereign, or some prince of the blood Royal, should appear .""V 
 
 It is, for instance, a fascinating study to trace along the history and the 
 rival fortunes of the Races of Men ; how certain laws of climate or of 
 blood seem to have compelled the Roman to his destiny, the Greek to 
 his, and the Anglo-Saxon to his. But no one studies those intricacies 
 really, who does not acknowledge that right across their currents, the 
 Omnipotent Life of some infinite child of God comes boldly in, setting 
 up here, pulling down there, and creating history. We prattle about 
 this Race which has achieved this, and that Race which has achieved 
 that, and then are forced to confess that one man, such a man as Abra- 
 ham, takes the whole destiny of what we call a Race, and uses it as a 
 boy uses a plaything. He diverts it from the course in which it was mov- 
 ing, and bids the history of the world turn another way. In the midst 
 of a luxurious physical and sensual civilization, close to the region 
 where tradition and theoiy imply that civilization began, this Abraham 
 is born in a race of men, all whose tendencies are beastly. That is, they 
 are governed through and through by physical appetite. Combine the 
 lowest lust of Vienna or Calcutta to-day, with the most wretched sensu- 
 ality of the tribes of the Amazon, and your picture is not black enough 
 to represent that nature-worship. In the midst of it this one man, Abra- 
 ham, breaks away. None of it for him ! He has spoken to the Unseen 
 Force who rules this universe. And that Force has spoken to him. He 
 will not stay and no family of his shall stay in such filth of debauchery. 
 Westward ! to the land God shall show him. The purpose it is, the de- 
 termination it is, of one man. He will leave them and he will open 
 another volume of history, with another basis and another destiny. 
 Westward he marches. He sets up his altar and pitches his tent. And 
 from that determination of his, that resolution made with prayer and 
 held to by a determined will, the after history of the whole world, as it 
 proves, proceeds. From that determination comes the purer life and 
 nobler being of a race of men who are not governed by appetite, but by 
 the will of the unseen God. From that race of men proceed, the laws 
 and institutions which at this hour underlie the civilization of the vic- 
 torious and successful half of the world. All because one man, conscious 
 of God's being, obeyed God's law as he understood it. The will of that
 
 THE MIRACLE OF LIFE. 73 
 
 man, the choice of that man, the determination of that man, say simply 
 the Life of that man so prevailed. The Holiday of to-day commemo- 
 rates such victories. 
 
 Such decision, determination, personal power is it which creates the 
 Christian civilization of all our half the world. America once discov- 
 ered, even- fool could say that the voyage was easy. America once 
 discovered, everv Vespucius, every Pinzon, every Cabot was willing to 
 make new voyages to the land they knew was there. No rebellious 
 crews now ! No wish to- turn back to Egypt after the Promised Land 
 has been found. It is just as now every invention has a hundred pirates. 
 A man cannot write a ballad, but he shall start a dozen parodies. But 
 the first Columbus ! Ah ! there is one of the victories of Life. It is 
 the resolute determination of a child of God which sends him forward. 
 It is not climate that makes him. It is not race that compels him nor 
 destiny. He is his own destiny. He sees through all the westward 
 fogs. He determines. He will carry through. Failure here, failure 
 there, this rebuff, that reburl', what are thev to an Infinite child of 
 an Infinite God? This thing must be done, shall be done. When the 
 faith and will of such a man speak thus, why, the thing is done. The 
 oceans give a pathway to such a determination and the new world is 
 thrown open to men who know how to use it. A victory of life over 
 things, over physical laws, over what men call fate or destiny ! 
 
 Yes, and these achievements arc only two little parts of the great 
 achievement of history, of the great central day of which this day is the 
 anniversary. The great event of history is in the great miracle of Life : 
 when to a paralyzed world Jesus Christ said, " Take up your bed and 
 walk," and at his voice that world obeyed. (The victory of life over 
 death ! Why to speak of the mere forms of physical being, it seems 
 that the Roman Empire, whos.- eagles flaunted in a dying Saviour's face, 
 whose soldiers nailed his body to the cross, was at that very instant dying 
 .out in its own lusts. It seems that in the direct result of the chosen law- 
 lessness of its being, the people were dying out of it, because, with its 
 eyes open, it preferred to live for the flesh and sense, and not to live by 
 the spirit and the truth. It seems there were fewer men and women in 
 each century than in the century before. It was to such physical death
 
 74 KASTEK. 
 
 as that that Jesus Christ spoke the word of more abundant life. And 
 that is only one illustration. It was to such cruelty as permitted parents 
 to kill their own children if they were in the way, it was to such ago- 
 nies ol bleeding hearts as were implied in the worst conceivable system 
 of slavery, it was to such lust in Rome and Athens and Alexandria as 
 repeated the beastly orgies from which Abraham turned in Ur of the 
 Cl aldees. it was from these that Jesus Christ bade the world turn and 
 Live ; and the world, hearing him, obeyed. It was from the placid 
 satisfaction in w r hich even the Ciceros and the Aureliuses said, as the 
 Platos and even the Socrates of another generation said, that the great 
 mass of the people were to be rated as the brutes, with lives like theirs, 
 and with rights like theirs and with deaths like theirs, that Jesus Christ 
 called noble and plebeian alike, and compelled each to own that the 
 other was his brother and of the same life-blood. 
 
 Yes, and such changes in habit, in thought and in society are only 
 the faint dawn of the day. Even in our time, though we see a world 
 which with the lip confesses his empire, we know how hollow is much 
 of the confession. " This people honoreth me with their tongue, but 
 their heart is far from me." We know how in Christian Paris, in 
 Christian London, in Christian New York, in Christian Boston, there is 
 heathenism, which, in its horrid way gives us the suggestions by which 
 we can study that more terrible heathenism of Athens and Rome and 
 Alexandria. Still we have now no fear of the issue.. There is a great 
 deal of reconstruction to be done, but the victory is sure, and we know 
 it. We know what Cicero and Aurelius did not know, that in this 
 world, God's Kingdom steadily comes. We know that this Easter day 
 shines on a nobler world than that of a century ago. We know that that 
 Easter was brighter than that of the century before. We know we need 
 no demonstration, that our children's children, a century hence, will 
 look back on the Christian civilization of to-day, amazed indeed, that we 
 should think it worthy of congratulation. 
 
 And all this is the victory of Life yes, of one Life. It is the victory 
 of him who is Lord of Life, of whom that title is the highest title and 
 the proper name. It is not in any physical law of gulf streams, of tidal 
 currents, of simooms, of the world's attractions in its orbit, or of the 
 perturbations in its planetary career that such changes come. They
 
 THE MIRACI.K OF LIFE. 75 
 
 are the victories of the Spirit. They are the conquests of Life. Into 
 this world came that Son of God, who knew God most completely. 
 
 And he said, " I have come that this world might have life, and 
 might have it abundantly." 
 
 And he lived, and he died, and this day he rose again. 
 
 Because he lived, this world begins to live truly. And of its Spirit- 
 ual birth this day is the anniversary !
 
 EASTER DAY. 
 
 BY REV. JOHN KEBLE. 
 
 "And as they were afraid, and bowed down their faces to the earth, they s:ud unto them, 
 Why seek ye the living among the dead? He is not here, but is risen." ST. LUKE, xxiv. 5, 6. 
 
 OH day of days ! shall hearts set free 
 No minstrel rapture" find for thee? 
 . Thou art the sun of other days, 
 They shine by giving back thy rays. 
 
 Enthroned in thy sovereign sphere 
 Thou shed'st thy light on all the year ; 
 Sundays by thee more glorious break, 
 An Easter Day in every week ; 
 
 And week-days, following in their train, 
 The fulness of thy blessing gain, 
 Till all. both resting and employ, 
 Be one Lord's day of holy joy. 
 
 Then wake, my soul, to high desires, 
 . And earlier light thine altar fires ; 
 The world some hours is on her way, 
 IMor thinks on thee, thou blessed day ; 
 
 Or if she think, it is in scorn ; 
 The vernal light of Easter morn 
 To her dark gaze no brighter seems 
 Than Reason's on the Law's pale beams. 
 (7 6 )
 
 TCASTKR DAY. 77 
 
 ' Where is your Lord? " she scornful asks ; 
 ' Where is his hire? W r e know his tasks. 
 
 Sons of a King ye boast to lie : 
 
 Let us your crowns and treasures see." 
 
 We in the words of truth reply. 
 (An angel brought them from the sky,) 
 " Our crown, our treasure, is not here, 
 'T is stored above the highest sphere : 
 
 " Methinks your wisdom guides amiss, 
 To seek on earth a Christian's bliss ; 
 We watch not now the lifeless stone : 
 Our only Lord is risen and gone." 
 
 Yet even the lifeless stone is dear. 
 For thoughts of him who late lay here ; 
 And the base world, now Christ has died, 
 Ennobled is, and glorified. 
 
 No more a charnel-house, to fence 
 
 The relics of lost innocence. 
 
 A vault of ruin and decay ; 
 
 The imprisoning stone is rolled away ; 
 
 'T is now a cell, where angels use 
 To come and go with heavenly news. 
 And in the ears of mourners say. 
 " Come, see the place where Jesus lav : " 
 
 'T is now a fane, where Love can find 
 Christ everywhere embalmed and shrined ; 
 Aye gathering up memorials sweet. 
 Where'er she sets her duteous feet.
 
 Oh ! joy to Mary first allowed, 
 When roused from weeping o'er his shroud, 
 By his own calm, soul-soothing tone, 
 Breathing her name as still his own ! 
 
 Joy to the faithful three renewed, 
 As their glad errand they pursued ! 
 Happy, who so Christ's word convey, 
 That he may meet them on their way ! 
 
 So is it still to holy tears, 
 In lonely hours, Christ risen appears ; 
 In social hours who Christ would see, 
 Must turn all tasks to Charity.
 
 THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS, 
 
 " We have passed from death unto life." I. JOHN, iii, 14. 
 
 IT is this change in this passage for which the Festival of to-day 
 rejoices. The bondage of the tomb is broken, yes, and a thousand other 
 chains as heavy. There are other prisons thrown open at a Master's 
 touch. A thousand fountains flow at the stroke of his rod. And for 
 all this the world rejoices. 
 
 What the change is, which his word and life bring on men, does not 
 appear till we trace it in some contrast, comparing the two careers, that 
 of a man who chooses to drink Immmortality at the Fountain of Life, 
 against him who only looks at the fountain as it runs, plays a minute, 
 perhaps, with the bubbles, and then marches on across a desert with 
 the supplies in his own water-bottles, satisfied with his own provision 
 for the day. They paint pictures sometimes, where the composition 
 shows a palace of luxury on one side and a hovel of misery on the 
 other. The painter tries to contrast the loveliness of skillful gardening 
 against the tangle of the sluggard's desert which jackals and foxes have 
 devoured. But the contrast is worse than that, more sharp and pathetic, 
 between the life, were it only of a twelve-month, of the man who at some- 
 season of determination chose Life, which decreed to be called Life, 
 chose Life infinite, or as the Bible says, " Life abundant," or " Life 
 eternal." against the other man who chose Life merely for its good 
 dinners and suppers, for its much money, or perhaps its tine clothes : of 
 the man whose resolves did not have in them the determination to He- 
 serve the girl he loved, or to rise to the knowledge he honored, or to 
 serve the world in which he lived. I have pleased myself sometimes, by 
 imagining the scene and meeting at the Lake of Galilee, say fifteen years 
 after the crucifixion, when Simon Peter and John, son of Zebedee. might 
 meet there often bv apostolic wanderings. There is a good theme for 
 
 (79)
 
 80 EASTKR. 
 
 a story, and I will give the hint to any of my friends of the Ladies' 
 Commission or the Sunday School, who would like to adventure in that 
 line of narrative. Let these two apostles meet there some fisherman 01 
 their own age, whose name never found itself in any gospel, has never 
 been repeated for the honor of a cathedral, has never been prized and 
 remembered by the founders of a city : some Obed or Micaiah or Nebat, 
 who when in the beginning, the Master of Life came down the lake and 
 said, "Follow me," had listened and determined that he would not 
 follow. If these fools, Andrew and Simon, John and James, and 
 Philip and the rest, the best fishermen on the shore, if they chose to go 
 off and leave their business, so much the worse for them, and so much the 
 better for him. He will supply their customers, and will step into their 
 shoes. He did start at the Master's eagerness. He listened, and then 
 went back to his fishing ! Such a man, day after day, would justify 
 to himself his own refusal and would be sure at last that he had 
 done the right thing. Peter and Andrew, James and John had left 
 their boats and had done what the Master bade them. Here were the 
 boats left on the lake ; here was all their share in the neglected business. 
 How easily a man who had been hard enough to resist the words oi 
 Christ would persuade himself that that was a godsend which relieved 
 him of such rivals. He would now build up a large trade with the 
 garrison at Tiberias, having quite the monopoly of the supply of the 
 port. But he must work quick, for the enthusiasts will be back again. 
 
 No ! the enthusiasts do not come back. Year by year passes and 
 they do not come back for more than a passing visit. And he, every 
 day, in these years, makes his trip, makes his catch, opens and cleans 
 his fish, goes to the garrison quartermaster with those that suit the 
 Roman taste, and then peddles out what are left here at home to the 
 villagers. 
 
 At some one of these passing visits of John the beloved, and of Peter, 
 who used to be such a leader in the little fleet of boats, some neighbor 
 makes a party for them and the three old comrades meet together. It is 
 fifteen years since they parted. Peter is not so arbitrary as he was, and 
 he does not look a day older than he did. He is friendly, cheerful, and 
 tries to recall old times. John does look older. Why, he was nothing but 
 a boy when they went away. He is perhaps more reserved now, but 
 still we cannot say " reserved " of a person so sympathetic, who has so
 
 THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 8 1 
 
 much to tell of all sorts of men, and enters so heartily into the secrets of 
 every life. 
 
 Imagine the Christian courtesy and readiness with which the two 
 apostles recall the past with their old companion. How they promise 
 to trv the boat with him in the morning and see if their hands have lost 
 their old skill. How they tell him of their adventures by sea and land in 
 other parts of the world and of men's customs there. But you will 
 have to imagine at the same time the contrast, as between night and 
 day, between the probable range of his mind, his interests, nay, his loves 
 and his hope, and theirs. They are partners in the Universe, and 
 fellow-laborers with God. He is the owner of one or two boats, and 
 trades with Tiberias in fish. They have enlarged life so much since 
 those early days, that it is like conning back to another world, to come 
 to it. But Life cramps him now more than it did then, for the habits 
 of boyhood and youth unchanged are the habits of a man, and so where 
 the man would have grown, he is only pinched and thwarted by this 
 hard armor. 
 
 Such men as John and Peter will not let the visit pass, without using 
 some time, in the sail on the lake, in the talk at the table, to lift this 
 man above thoughts of the salt market and the fish market, the best 
 way to make a corner here, or to secure profit there. And they will 
 succeed. But every time it is they who lift, and he who is lifted. 
 Their Life is real Life, the largest, the loftiest and the deepest. His 
 life, when they find him is it life? is mechanical, small, low and dead, 
 because he has been selfish. And the one token that his nature is like 
 theirs, and his possibilities like theirs, is that he knows that this is so. 
 
 it would be easy to imagine just such a contrast between Paul and 
 some old Pharisee companion, as they should meet twenty years after 
 he heard the call of Christ, and waked at Damascus to a life large and 
 true. I wish one of the masters of imagination in such themes, such a 
 man as Charles Kingsley, or William Ware, would work that out for us. 
 It would be a very true romance, and very pathetic. Paul at Jerusalem, 
 just before the Jew mob gathered round him, might, did, I suppose-, 
 meet more than one such old fellow-student, class-mate of the old col- 
 lege days of Gamaliel. Paul was prince of gentlemen, and he would
 
 82 
 
 K AST EH. 
 
 have greeted such a man in the most cordial way. Fresh from travel, 
 used to the best society, he had been with scholars, with rulers, prefects 
 and their courts, had seen the leading men of the Hebrew faith all 
 through Greece and Asia Minor, and was in nowise cut off as yet 
 from Jewish communion. And the other for twenty years tithing mint 
 and anise and cumin, at the most arranging a new procession, or intrigu- 
 ing for the election of a high-priest. Paul's range of interests is in 
 nothing less than the establishment absolutely of the Kingdom of God. 
 If you come at his heart of hearts, if he would talk of what in solitude 
 he dreamed of, he would tell you how he saw Caesar's throne tottering ; 
 every altar in the world grown cool ; every slave set free, and every chain 
 broken. Nay, this is little. He looks across the veil, as those who see 
 what is invisible. That other world, as men call it, is this world to 
 Paul. That future life, as men say, is now to him. He meets the little 
 country scribe, his old schoolmate, as a Christian gentleman meets a 
 gentleman. But, as when the three parted fishermen met, John and Peter 
 and their friend, so here Paul has to lift, and the other ta be lifted. 
 Paul lias tr> lead and the other to be led ; for Paul is alive, and the other 
 is dead in his jots and tittles, his forms, rubrics, traditions and commen- 
 taries. Paul lias entered upon the real life of a child of God. The other 
 is still hammering among things, living as beasts live, and no wonder if 
 he fears to die as they die. 
 
 For here is no contrast, observe, between the man who has travelled 
 and him who has staid at home. It is not the contrast between him 
 who has preached to Greeks and Colossians and Ephesians, and him 
 who has served his generation in the walks just as noble of home life. It 
 is not the contrast between the well-informed man and the ill-informed 
 man. No ; you find the same contrast in the same house, between two 
 people, neither of whom have left the same town. If you would g > 
 with me into some one of these great clusters of houses, where under 
 one roof are contrasts of life as broad as between Greenland and India, 
 I could show you this same contrast there. At one door there should 
 welcome us an old man, the mere beauty of whose face would attract 
 you as you stood at the door. The courtesy of his manner would teach 
 you what is meant by the words, ' nature's gentlemen." If it were only 
 in the cheerfulness of his talk, he would lift us above any commonplace
 
 THE SUN OF RIGHTEOUSNESS. 83 
 
 or petty range of conversation. Before we knew it, we should be ask- 
 ing him some question, which might perhaps give us the clue to the 
 evenness, grace, bearing and contentment, of an old age so well ordered, 
 of life so well balanced. Yet I cannot vouch for his grammar, and 
 his learning goes scarcely beyond the Bible. While his neighbor if 
 we are bold enough to make him a visit has nothing to tell us, and 
 seems to have everything to ask. He has everything to complain of. 
 and he keeps all the interview upon himself. His conflict with things 
 seems to have made him a thing as well. We are glad to escape from 
 the interview, and are at a loss to know how this man is to be lifted any 
 higher than the level which he seems to have chosen. Now the one of 
 these men, as tar as one sees, has travelled as much as the other. The 
 one has learned the same external facts as the other. The difference 
 came into their lives, whenever one consciously looked up to God and 
 tried to serve him, and the other consciously looked down and tried to 
 forget him. In those moments one chose unending and unbounded re- 
 lations for his life, and the other chose dungeons, fetters and all 
 restraints for his. If they both stay at home for ten years, one lives out- 
 side himself, ranges in thought and hope through the very streets of the 
 eternal citv, meets in companionship with the whole army of prophets 
 and heroes,, who have given themselves to the infinite service of man- 
 kind. And the other, though they travel sea and land, carries every- 
 where with him his own hamper ; feels everywhere his own pulse, is 
 cursed everywhere with his own heart-aches, and. of necessity, leads 
 but a very petty life, because his life is centred in himself. One of the 
 two is of that class of whom it is said that you find everywhere a cheer- 
 ful outlook, a perfect determination t> relieve suffering and a certaintv 
 that it could be relieved, a sort of sweetness of disposition, which comes 
 from the habit of looking across the line as if death were little or noth- 
 ing, and with that a disposition to be social, to meet people more than 
 halfway." And this is only to say in more words, that this man, the 
 day he became partner in the universe, took all the largeness and ac- 
 cepted all the responsibilities, of Faith, of Hope and Love. But the 
 other trusted nothing, hoped for nothing and loved nobody. For him- 
 self he tried to live, and e\ en in that trial failed. For life which 
 deserves the name of life is not possible on these conditions. He vege- 
 tated, if it is not disrespect to the vegetables to say so. He existeu ;
 
 84 EASTEK. 
 
 but as you saw, When you met him, he had no life to add to your lite, 
 no word to make you cheerful, no experience which you would not fling 
 from you like a burning coal. Unless you could bring him some help 
 there was no reason why you two should come together. 
 
 Halt the world rouses itself to-day to do honor in some form, simple 
 or elaborate, to that Master of Life, who from such death of selfish 
 separation rouses men to such largeness and reality of a common life. 
 It is as the sun in the heavens, as the spring days lengthen, wakens in 
 every meadow a million blades of grass which he found sleeping. He 
 calls them out of the earth, into a higher life. He quickens them, he 
 fosters them, he attracts them, he compels them so that they draw in the 
 nobler forms of dress, of houses, of light and of heat ; and in their 
 little way they too give out of their own power, they breathe out a bless- 
 ing in their turn. The air is the purer, the perfume is the sweeter be- 
 cause these millions of blades of grass have started out of the cold death 
 of the winter, into the generous mutual life of the new-born year. 
 What the sun in the sky does to those blades of grass, this Sun of Right- 
 eousness who is Lord of this Easter Day has done to a million million 
 lives whom he has called from that dead selfishness of lonely and sepa- 
 rated life, into communion with each other, into certainty of their own 
 future, into life in common with an infinite God. In that call he takes 
 the name, " Sun of Righteousness." In that name this Sun-Day, 
 day of Light and Heat and Life, becomes his day, or the Lord's Dav. 
 Where he speaks and where the child of God listens, listens as Peter 
 and Paul listened, to answer and to follow, there a world of life opens 
 to the vision ot that child of God, a world of activity opens upon the 
 will aroused, worlds upon worlds of future life open before the quick- 
 ened gaze. Ves ! The society and companionship even of the infinite 
 God, Lord of heaven and earth, become the august privilege, too great 
 for stumbling words, of him who was yesterday only a fisherman or 
 publican, or a hair-splitting pedant, if to-day he listen to this call. In 
 the wonder-work of the Bible, as Dr. Martineau has said so well, the 
 English peasant is made partaker of the marvels of history and of the 
 world. The Hebrew prophet is in presence of the English tradesman, 
 or domesticated in the Scotch village, is better understood when he 
 speaks of Jordan than even Burns is understood when he celebrates the
 
 THE SUN OK RIGHTEOUSNESS. 05 
 
 Greta, or Wordsworth when he writes of the Yarrow. But this is only 
 one little type or illustration of that free masonry, wider than this world, 
 of him who is partner in the Universe. The Saviour of men looked 
 outside of Galilee, outside this little world, into all worlds, and to all 
 men he oners share in the inheritance and the vision. 
 
 But on the other hand, the child of God may refuse to listen. God's 
 child is free, as is his Father. From the word that is spoken he mav 
 turn away. Like Satan in the poem, he may turn from his place in 
 the Empire of Heaven, and in some under-world create for himself a 
 kingdom of his own. The blade of grass, which is summoned to-day 
 to throw or! the clod above it, must obey. Though it be deep down in 
 the dark earth, the living heat of the sun penetrates, where the light 
 cannot strike down, and the germ must start to consciousness, must 
 find its own way up to light and love, must live and grow. But man 
 may resist to the bitter end. To the fisherman at Bethsaida, who stands 
 where Peter stands, the call comes, as it comes to Peter, and the fisher- 
 man mav say *' No," or perhaps he will not care even to speak, but will 
 quietly turn away from Infinite Life, and with his eyes open, choose to- 
 day's chance at fishing as better. When Saul hears the plaintive call, 
 'Saul, Saul, why dost thou persecute me?" there is some other dab- 
 ster over forms, whose name is all forgotten, who hears a like cry, 
 plaintive and tender, and shuts his ears, as if he did not hear. And so 
 to-day, among these thousand tokens of life renewed, among a thousand 
 glories of life, among all the tokens and treasures of infinite beauty, in- 
 finite wisdom, infinite love, it is possible still to refuse to commune 
 with God, to refuse to look into heaven, to refuse to share and share 
 with these companions. Such prerogative of freedom man enjoys. He 
 can close his eyes, he can close his ears, he can harden his heart, lie can 
 live men do live as the beasts live, so that he shall die men do die 
 with as little hope and joy as the beasts die withal. But our Easter 
 morning wakes us, with its storm of perfume, music, love, light and 
 glory, that we may tread under our feet such fetters of bondage. With 
 all its voices and all its memories it allures us that we may pass from 
 fleath unto life, in the new birth of a higher being, of those WHO UVK 
 
 IN IX)VE.
 
 THE FAREWELL AT AZAN. 
 
 BY EDWIN ARNOLD, 
 
 FAREWELL, friends ! Yet not farewell ; 
 
 Where I am, ye, too, shall dwell. 
 
 I am gone before your face. 
 
 A moment's time, a little space. 
 
 When ye have come where I have stepped 
 
 Ye will wonder why ye wept ; 
 
 Ye will know, by wise love taught, 
 
 That here is all, and there is naught. 
 
 Weep awhile, if ye are fain, 
 
 Sunshine still must follow rain ; 
 
 Only not at death, for death, 
 
 Now I know, is that first breath 
 
 Which our souls draw when we enter 
 
 Life, which is of all life centre. 
 
 Be ye certain all seems love. 
 Viewed from Allah's throne above ; 
 Be ye stout of heart, and come 
 Bravely onward to your home ! 
 La Allah ilia Allah ! yen ! 
 Thou love divine ! Thou love alway ! 
 
 He that died at A/an gave 
 
 This to those who made his jjrave.
 
 THE LIFE WAS THE LIGHT OF MEN, 
 
 OUR Southern Indians worshipped the Rising Sun. The chief of the 
 Natchez tribe, who was its priest, mounted early upon the high hill 
 which they had perhaps made for such worship, and with the first ray 
 of the glad light made signal to the waiting throng that the new day's 
 life had come. Their morning worship is the announcement ot their 
 daily joy that light gives life, and that light and life are one. 
 
 That savage worship suggests the eager purport of this text of St. 
 John. He is using the fanciful language of the fooleries of his time, 
 for better purpose than it has ever borne before. He would fain, if he can, 
 make those who read, remember that the world has its light as it has its 
 life from the one God who makes it and orders it. It does not, a the 
 Egyptian doctrine of yons implied, receive Light from one source and 
 Life from another, it does not go here for its Truth and there for its 
 Love. The gifts of God are not thus divided in various arsenals, nor 
 are we treated as some wretched commander is treated, who has to send 
 to one department for his powder, to another for his shot, to another 
 for his shells, sent to Washington for his instructions, and to Alaska for 
 his men. The Life of the worKl is the Light of the world, and its 
 Light is its Life. " We have all received of his Fullness." indeed, 
 as he takes care soon to say, and as James says, in his Epistle, we all, 
 when we choose, " partake of the Divine nature." 
 
 The world's theologians, in its recent days, have been generally men 
 who learned what little they knew from books, from such oracles as 
 nominative cases and verbs, and have learned them with the errors that 
 to such limited methods belong. It is not unnatural then that their 
 habit of speaking of the Saviour of men should have become a habit 
 of making him such a one as themselves. Their Christ is one who has 
 a doctrine to teach. He has obtained information whicli he is to im- 
 
 (8?)
 
 88 EASTER. 
 
 part. We are to go to him for Light, and we are to carry this Light to 
 others. What he brings to us is a Revelation. All this indeed is true, nor 
 can there be any possible harm in compelling the world to receive it. But 
 then, why here is only a very little of the truth ! How is it that this Christ 
 teaches me the Golden Rule ? How is it that he compels me to prav in the 
 Lord's Prayer ? How is it that when I hear the parable of the Prodigal 
 Son, I know that God and man are united in the union there described? 
 It is because here is the Life of Men. It is because the Life of the 
 World grows, thrives, enjoys, succeeds, lives, when the World takes in 
 and takes on this habit of Life. When the World is one with its God 
 as he is, then the World knows what it is to Live. 
 
 It is perfectly true, as persons indifferent to Christianity point out, 
 that Jesus Christ did not first discover, reveal, or point out the Immor- 
 tality of man. No indeed ! In that matter, as in all others, kt God had 
 never left himself without a witness." Martha had stammered out at 
 her brother's grave, " I know that he shall rise again at the Last Day." 
 Plenty of announcements before of man's immortality. But the marvel of 
 the Saviour's work, and the Miracle of Easter, is that he makes men 
 believe these announcements, and take them into the field and purport of 
 their daily Life. As he himself says, he not only comes that men may 
 have Life, but he comes that they may have it more abundantly than 
 they had it before. He makes them Live with Life so true, and their 
 Life is so large and full, that they know that it does not end with the 
 physical accident of death. With every hour of such Life, men feel 
 better the great words, " /Am," with which God describes his always 
 present being. Or, if we speak of texts, such men know better the 
 meaning of the Saviour's own words when he says, so simply, " Be- 
 cause I live, ye shall live also." 
 
 Our business on Easter morning i to compare the large life of the 
 world, as he set it throbbing, enjoying, enlarging and truly living, with 
 what the world called life when he was born into it. It is this contrast be- 
 tween life dying, gasping and almost dead, and the life of to-day, exulting, 
 triumphing and increasing, which justifies our Easter rejoicings. Com- 
 pare, for instance, the life of a child, as Jesus found childhood, against the 
 life of a child as it exists in all Christian Ian .Is to-day. When Herod 
 the Great, with one stroke, killed all the children in Bethlehem, he did 
 nothing which was much out of the way, in his own habit, or indeed,
 
 THE LIFE WAS THE LIGHT OF MEN. 89 
 
 in the history of his time. He killed so many of his own children in- 
 deed, that in a joke, long remembered, the Emperor said he had rather 
 be Herod's hog, than Herod's son. When he killed the children in 
 Bethlehem, nobody could say him nay, but I suppose in strictness, he 
 then only used the power of the strongest. But when he killed his own 
 children, he was wholly within his own rights, at Roman law. Children 
 were nothing, they had no rights, one might say they had no lives of 
 their own, until there came this infinite enlargement of life in which we 
 live. We call it Christianity. In this life the new-born infant, also, 
 is recognized as a child of God, born into the family and partner in its 
 privileges and its duties. You may see the old system now in any un- 
 tamed savage tribe. If the march is too long or too hard for the boy 
 or girl, if boy or girl winces under the burden which is divided 
 between them and the dogs, the blow of a hatchet leaves the child's 
 body on the trail, and the march goes on unencumbered. 
 
 It is from such daily death that the child who was born in Bethlehem 
 lifts all childhood into a larger life. 
 
 And so also of the life of women. In Palestine, undoubtedly it was 
 at its ve~y best. Nothing in Greek or Roman or Egy])tian life, in that 
 day, compares for freedom or for largeness, with such a life as Mary 
 Mother could have led in Nazareth, or any other peasant woman of 
 Galilee. But Palestine is only a speck on the world's surface, and though 
 vou bring to bear on literature all the light you can, though you mavread 
 between the lines as boldly as you dare, you only find that the women of the 
 time, the best and noblest of them are straws upon the current of the world's 
 life. They are sometimes the playthings of sovereigns, they sometimes 
 rise to the dignity of ornaments, and sometimes a Cleopatra leads an An- 
 tony to his ruin. But that woman like man is living and moving in the 
 infinite work and purpose of God, that she may light new lights in the 
 world's darkness, and plant new seed in its deserts, that woman with 
 man is put into the world to subdue it, that God entrusts to her as to 
 him the making it a part of his heaven, this appears nowhere in litera- 
 ture or in history, till the Marys and Salomes take their share in the 
 life of the Gospels, until Mary Mag.laL-ne teaches Simon Peter his 
 great lesson at an open tomb. If one could say nothing more, one would 
 be forced to say this, that the working power of the world was at least 
 doubled when the new life thus entrusted to woman her half of the \\ '.>rk 
 which God entrusts to all his children.
 
 90 KASTER. 
 
 In another way, and by other lines, the new life which dates from 
 this day creates all modern commerce, all modern discovery and inven- 
 tion, almost all modern manufactures even, and agriculture ; certainly all 
 modern science, modern law, modern government, and s > modern civi- 
 lization. The world has been perfectly right in drawing the line at 
 Easter morning which separates its ancient history from its modern his- 
 tory, its old from its new. Thursday night, Jesus Christ himself might 
 call the ideal Satan " the Prince of this world." " The Prince of this 
 world cometh, and hath nothing in me." But let Go:>d Friday pass, 
 and let Easter morning come, and from Easter morning for nineteen hun- 
 dred years, or for nineteen thousand, Jesus Christ is Prince of this world, 
 King of Kings, and Lord of Lords. At his word, as I say, modern com- 
 merce starts into being. That little catechism I read here last Sunday, 
 " The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," teaches his law of life to a few 
 stragglers in Greece. " This is the way to live," it says. " Thou shalt 
 love the Lord thy God, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." 
 "What a poor crumb is that," you say, to throw out upon the dark, 
 wild waters of an angry world. Crumb if you please, but this I know, 
 that in the fullness of time, if a tradesman on one side the world choose 
 to write to the tradesmen the other side of the world this letter, " Send 
 me twenty ships laden with your wheat, and I will send you whatever 
 you bid me in recompense," I know that that request will be honored. 
 It shall be flashed through the ocean in an instant, in less time than it 
 takes Juno to send from one side Mt. Olympus to another. And with- 
 out an instant's hesitation, it will be honored by a man who never saw 
 the sender and never will see him, who is of another nation, another lan- 
 guage, and another law. This will come about, and in less than nine- 
 teen hundred years, because all men are brethren and at bottom know 
 they are brethren, because they mean to bear one another's burdens. 
 That is to say, the mutual confidence, which is centre and secret of all 
 modern commerce, is really born from the new life. " I, if I be lifted 
 up, will bring all men unto me." 
 
 Work out for yourself if you can, the contrasted picture of the com- 
 merce of that day. Imagine the lordly purveyor for the tables of Tibe- 
 rius. There comes to him one morning, as he sits in his cabinet, a fa- 
 vorite of the Emperor. " Marcus," he says, " our lord has heard from 
 a great traveller of a new luxury. At the other end of Asia they use a
 
 THE LIKE WAS THE LIGHT OF MEN. 91 
 
 tonic drink which cheers them, as wine does not cheer us, and yet it 
 does not intoxicate. They use it as a dried leaf, which they steep in 
 boiling water. Our lord bids you provide it, and tell me, when can it 
 be here? " The purveyor replies in dismay, " I also had heard of this 
 elixir, but I had hoped no tidings of it would ever come to our Master's 
 ears. S.'iy to him that in three years from this day, if the lives of my 
 messengers are spared, he shall taste the infusion at the festival of Bac- 
 chus." And then in his dejection, he calls his most successful traveller, 
 he gives him two or three diamonds to stitch into his girdle, he gives him 
 what would buv a hundred slaves for his expenses of travel. He is to 
 go to the farthest East, and to return with as much of this new elixir as 
 he can safely bear upon his person. And he must be in Rome again 
 betore three years have gone by. But. long before that time, alas ! his 
 diamonds have been blazing in the crests of Kurdish princes and his 
 bones have been whitening in the Kurdish desert. And when the 
 feast of Bacchus comes, the Emperor of half the world must celebrate 
 it without the new sensation. 
 
 It would be worth while to trace out the same contrast in the diher- 
 encc- between agriculture, manufactures, navigation, literature, art and 
 science, now and then. There is hardly a single detail, where the con- 
 trast is not as strong as that between a man fumbling at midnight for a 
 tool which he cannot find, and the same man working with the same 
 tool in the clear sunlight of noon-day. And in each of these contrasts, 
 we should rind what must serve us as one example in detail of t'.ie world's 
 resurrection from the dead to-day ; it is the way in which the new life ot 
 the world calls The People into being. Whole nations, alas ! have not 
 yet heard this call. Many of what are called Christian kingdoms do not 
 understand it. Even the great democratic governments like ours, falter 
 and are afraid of it. But all the same it sounds steadily and makes it- 
 self intelligible. * God has made of one blood all nations of the world," 
 and, He who is greatest among you shall be your minister." These are 
 the central lights for the guidance of this New Departure. Little won- 
 der that tiie common people always heard him gladly, the carpenter of 
 Nazareth. Little wonder that priests and rulers heard him with terror 
 and suspicion. It was so in the beginning, it will be so to the end. 
 But more and more t'.ie truth shines out, that every baby born into the 
 world is child of God. infinite and eternal. Every such child must be
 
 EASTER. 
 
 entrusted with every privilege, must be trained with every care. For 
 every such child is born to these infinite possibilities. Give to the child 
 full chance, the chance which you would give to an imagined archangel, 
 and there is no saying to what that possibility shall come. Trust to the 
 full, God's abundant love and give to each child the best you know how 
 to give, for its health, its happiness, its growth, and its education, or in 
 one word for its life, and then you gain infinite power though you were 
 in a New England township or a Swiss canton. It is power for inven- 
 tion, power for discovery, power for research, power for teaching and 
 for learning, power for enlarging the world's life in short, such as no 
 Tiberius in Capri, no Croesus in Sardis ever dreamed of, and such as 
 their wealth and power could never command. For a hundred and fifty 
 years, while in a half feudal system, your American colonies maintain 
 one class of proprietaries, one class of gentlemen, one class of laborers, and 
 one class of slaves, while to one and another they dole out rights and privi- 
 leges with unequal hand, according as the baby is born in a log-cabin or in 
 a house of cedar, so long things stand still for America . But once destroy 
 this paper system, as Copernicus destroyed the imagined mechanism of 
 Ptolemy, once speak to all your people, poor and rich, black and white, 
 fools and learned in a Saviour's words, once say, and mean it when you 
 say it, k> One is your Father, and all ye are brethren." Say this as if you 
 meant it, and not with the decorous mouthing of the pulpit or of a lit- 
 urgy. Say to all priests and all noblemen that you mean it, and to all 
 laborers and all slaves that you mean it. Let your laws echo it. Make 
 your constitutions as if this and only this were true. Then even a pal- 
 sied land will take up its bed and walk. Here in America, so soon as 
 that word was spoken, though the laughing critics call it a '' gilded 
 generality," there was no wilderness where man's foot did not enter, 
 there was no ocean he did not traverse, no mountain which he did not 
 cut down, and no valley which was not exalted. Man is told he is child 
 of God. He tries the experiment. And lo ! what they told him is so. 
 He too rides on the whirlwind and controls the storm. Born in a hov- 
 el, if you please. Yes ! but he becomes the greatest of his brethren for 
 all that, if only he accept the Gospel rule, and live in the Gospel life, 
 if only he make himself the servant of all. 
 
 It is not in these beautiful flowers only, it is not in the Easter eggs
 
 THE LIFE WAS THE LIGHT OF MEN. 93 
 
 only, in the opening crocus, in the song of our robins, or in the baptism 
 of our darling children, that we are to find the symbols of Easter, or its 
 trophies. There is not one comfort or joy of our modern life which 
 would be in any sort possible to us, but for the larger life which, in 
 Jesus Christ, the world began to live in his life and gospel. So true is 
 it, that his gospel is not a lesson simply, but a life. It is the Light of 
 the world, but that is because it is the Life of the world. You know I 
 am fond of saying that these little children of ours are born into the 
 Christian Church. They are of it, beyond peradventure. It was a 
 Christian blanket which warmed the baby's naked limbs. It was 
 Christian science that saved the baby's life. It was the Christian coal 
 burned in a Christian furnace which warmed the Christian home in 
 which the Christian child lived, where the child of the savage would 
 have died, had the wretched wife of the savage tarried in such a winter 
 to give him life. But each one of us may learn the same lesson in his 
 own home. The food upon the table, the flowers from the greenhouse, 
 the morning newspaper, the street car in which I rode to church, the 
 casting of the bell which sounded in the tower, the tones of the organ 
 which spoke to me of peace and triumph in its harmonies, the inspira- 
 tion of the music of the Easter anthem, nay ! even the cunning of the 
 hand which designed the font for baptism are only offshoots of the Life 
 of the world, which lives, because Jesus Christ lived and died and rose 
 again. 
 
 " Because I live, ye shall live also." 
 
 " The things that I do, ye shall do also, and greater things than these 
 shall ye do." 
 
 k ' For I, if I be lifted up, will draw all men unto me." 
 
 " In Him was Life, and the Life was the Light of Men."
 
 THE SECRET PLACE OF THE MOST HIGH. 
 
 BY WILLIAM C. GANNETT. 
 
 THE Lord is in His Holy Place 
 
 In all things near and far, 
 Shekinah of the snow flake, He, 
 
 And glory of the star. 
 And Secret of the April-land 
 
 That stirs the field to flowers, 
 Whose little tabernacles rise 
 
 To hold Him through the hours. 
 
 He hides Himself within the love 
 
 Of those that we love best : 
 The smiles and tones that make our home? 
 
 Are shrines by Him possessed. 
 He tents within the lonely heart 
 
 And shepherds every thought. 
 We find Him not by seeking long, 
 
 We lose Him not unsought. 
 
 So though we build a Holy Place 
 
 To be our Sinai-stand, 
 The Holiest of Holies still 
 
 Is never made by hand. 
 Our Sinai needs the listening ear, 
 
 Our Garden needs the vow : 
 " Thy will be done," and lo ! Thy voice, 
 
 Thy vision as we bow !
 
 IMMORTAL 
 
 "What is mortal may be swallowed up of life." 2 CORINTHIANS, v, 4. 
 
 " IT is a little thing in comparison to believe in immortality. The 
 great thing is to live as an immortal." This fundamental statement, 
 made nearly in these words by Rev. John Weiss, a man of rare relig- 
 ious genius, announces the central truth, which gives the real value to 
 the festivities of to-day. The joy of the new Life, the jubilee triumph 
 because Li e is larger than it once was, and is to be larger than it is, the 
 new strength, the new health, the new certainty which come to the 
 world because its life is larger than it was, all these are quite impossible 
 to beasts who die, as they are impossible to clocks which stop when the 
 weights have run down. They all belong to the victories of Immortal 
 beings, who know they are Immortal. 
 
 And the lesson of Easter for you and me, we would seek a lesson, 
 will be- learned, if we rightly ask what eternal beings do. who have such 
 senses, such muscles, such hopes and fears as we, and if we find an an- 
 swer. What is there which a man can achieve, looking forward and 
 able to look forward, which a brute cannot achieve, because he does 
 not 1' ok forward and cannot? How does this surety of eternity arVect 
 clailv life, what I sav, what I plan, and what I do? I read a speech of 
 Julius Caesar and he tells me, that when a blood vessel breaks, my life 
 stops forever. But I do not believe that my life stops forever, because 
 that mere button in my dress gives way. How will that difference be- 
 tween me and Ciesar affect what I think and say and do? 
 
 Mr. Ruskin lavs it down as a canon of art, that no painting should 
 ever shut us up in an interior, so completely, but that the eye may some- 
 where struggle beyond, and see through a window, through a doorway, 
 through a passage between columns or a rift in the trees, to the infinite 
 blue of an infinite heaven. Whoever has to change the composition of 
 
 (95)
 
 96 I.ASTKK. 
 
 his picture, so as to do this, to change from the mere sketch of u room 
 shut up, to that larger scheme, which includes that bit of heaven, knows 
 very well that the change is no simple change of one or two details. 
 Every color must be changed, every li^ht and every shadow. Our rela- 
 tions now are with infinite affairs, and the infinite considerations which 
 we have brought in, will affect everything with which we have to do. 
 The mere camera, indeed, which I have focused for an object the other 
 side of the room, needs entire re-adjustment, before I direct it to an ob- 
 ject the other side the river or the bay. And that single hint as to a 
 different perspective for near drawing, or distant, carries us far. The 
 little child has to learn to see. First of all she sees her own hands and 
 learns to know that these fingers are her own. It is a step, a happy 
 step, when beyond the hands and outside of them, she learns the face 
 of her mother, always ready, always kind, almost always near, but alas, 
 sometimes away ! But the whole machinery of vision must be changed, 
 and the whole process of thought enlarged, when the infant knowledge 
 which perceives and comprehends these two, goes farther, and knows 
 the curtain and the window, and, at last, the rattle or the straw. It is 
 by successive steps from these that the child at last conceives the idea 
 of distance, which is not natural indeed to an infinite soul, and learns 
 how to measure in a fashion the difference between the tree in the gar- 
 den, and the chair in the room. Here is, on a small scale, and with 
 steps which are petty in comparison, the process of the enlargement of 
 vision alone. With that enlargement comes the growth and enlarge- 
 ment of every other faculty, nay ! the growth of mind itself which con- 
 trols such faculties, and in the end the enlargement of that soul which 
 commands the mind to come and go about its business. It is in that 
 enlargement, as this text puts it, that the mortal is clothed upon with 
 the immortal. A mortal man now begins to live and move and think 
 and speak as an immortal being does. 
 
 In Mrs. Trimmer's story of" The Robins." a child's book, now for- 
 gotten in the nursery, the brightest sentence was the exclamation of one 
 of the half-fledged little birds, who, having flown out of the nest for the 
 first time, cries out to its mother, " What a very large place the world 
 is." When the little robin is fully fledged, she will be able to fly above 
 the apple tree, and will see that the orchard, which was but just now 
 so large a world, fills in truth a space very small in a world which has
 
 IMMORTAL. 
 
 97 
 
 become much bigger. And if the robin could soar like the lark, the 
 circle of the horizon would expand again. 'the hills but just now distant 
 would in their turn become near, an.l with a very different sense, she 
 would be crying again, c; How very large is the world ! " And yet this 
 horizon is nothing if robin or lark learn to look into the sun, like the eagle, 
 or if, by this time, there come the unanswerable question, " What is 
 there beyond the sun?" or, " What is there beyond the farthest star?" 
 
 All these enlargements of the horizon are littie analogies of what hap- 
 pened to the literature of the world, when the new world was born and 
 the old world ended. That is to say, when literature began to speak ot 
 man as being an immortal instead of talking of him as a mere brute, 
 with the gift cf speech, who, at the best, stopped living at three score, 
 or say four score years. Compare the book of Proverbs, for instance, 
 with Paul's Letter to the Philippians. The first is as wise as you 
 please. It is very bright. It is useful. It is practical. It is shrewd. 
 It is even humorous in places. But then ! it is all so narrow, so re- 
 stricted ! You turn over to the end to look for something more. Is it 
 possible, you say, that this is all these men had to say about life, when 
 they were so sharp and keen? Why ! this is not life, they talk about, 
 this is nothing but clockwork, the swing of the pendulum here, and the 
 twitch of the second hand there. From this you turn over to the 
 Epistle to the Philippians. It is all jubilant with the joy and confi- 
 dence of divine being ! You are not saying anything about heaven per- 
 haps, but you talk like a person who is in heaven. He who writes 
 really knows what the jov of God is, the joy of creating, the joy of sustain- 
 ing, the joy of living and loving forever. That is the reason why this 
 exile, writing in a prison to a handful of provincials, the most prosper- 
 ous of whom was peddling dye-stufts for a living, keeps saying, " Re- 
 joice evermore ! Rejoice in the Lord. The Lord is at hand." And 
 Paul speaks with that large certainty which has in the end preserved 
 this little letter of his so that it is remembered everywhere among the 
 classics of good cheer and enthusiasm. It speaks the pass-words and 
 rallying cries. " Forgetting the things which are behind and stretching 
 forward to the things which are before." 
 
 On the whole, this is the contrast between the Old Testament and the 
 New Testament, though in the great, glad exceptions the Old Testa- 
 ment is prophetic. Still, speaking in general, what harasses you as you
 
 90 EASTER. 
 
 read your book of Kings or of Chronicles, is the feeling, perhaps unde- 
 fined, that this all belongs to a corner of Asia, and perhaps to the life 
 of some Gideon or Barak, of whom you know little and perhaps care 
 less. In the New Testament, you are on different ground, and are breath- 
 ing a different atmosphere. And when you look for the horizon to your 
 picture, there is none. These men who write and talk, speak as im- 
 mortals to an immortal ; and, for the instant, you cannot but accept 
 their postulate. In their company you are as one of them. And he, 
 the leader of them all, who starts them on this line of address, at once 
 so simple and so large, he takes from first to last the ground that as he 
 is Son of God you are God's sons and daughters, that you share the in- 
 finite life. Death? What is it? They who truly live can never die. 
 
 And you might make the same contrast between classical literature 
 and all modern literature. Man is a much larger being to the writer of 
 our time than he was to Virgil or Livy or Herodotus, and it is this 
 truth which asserts itself whether there be any formal allusion to his im- 
 mortality or no. Indeed, since what we call modern history comes in, 
 you may almost measure men against each other by comparing them as 
 an infinite purpose, the purpose of an immortal, comes into their en- 
 terprise or does not. Thus Columbus went and came that God, in 
 Jesus Christ, might be the ruler of this world. The wealth of the In- 
 dies should redeem the Holy Sepulchre. The people of the Indies 
 should bow before the cross. The world should be one world, and 
 Jesus Christ should be its King. What follows on . plans so large, in a 
 range so wide, is that men rate Columbus as one of the first of men and 
 rate him rightly. But if you had asked within twenty years of his death 
 who was the first man of his time you would not have heard his name. 
 Men would have talked to you of that Emperor who was enrolling 
 navies and compelling armies. But alas ! the Emperor had no object 
 but himself, and to-day he is only another Goliath or Ajax, a savage 
 on a throne wearing a crown, without any of the purposes of immortal- 
 ity. Such a man dies, and in a generation, in less than a generation, 
 there is nobody left to pretend he is first of men. 
 
 And let any man to-day take for leading motives the motives which 
 might impel Uriel or Abdiel, or any other servant of God who is not
 
 1MMOKTAL. 
 
 99 
 
 worried by fear of death, or of what may follow it. Let a man live 
 with God, not afraid to talk with him. Let him study God's plans and 
 methods, as one of Michael Angelo's pupils might study his. Let him 
 work in nature's laboratory, tracing the present processes of creation as 
 they go on to-day when the lily opens, or let him study history, anil in 
 the evolution of century from century see what it is which is weak, :md 
 what that is which prevails, how vice and crime are powerless an 1 
 bring forth no issue, and how righteousness exalts a nation. Or let a 
 man undertake, with other men and women, what he might. suppose an 
 angel would do, not fettered by time nor anxious about its passage. L.t 
 him range from hovel to garret in seeking his society, let him house 
 with crime if he can so help crime, let him carry comfort to beggary, 
 and teach beggary the secrets of industry. Let him live with men for 
 men, not as if the clothes that he wears, or the viands he eats were of 
 the first import. Such life with God is what the Saints mean by Faith. 
 Such life for men is what they mean by Love. The man who bids his 
 life move in such causes, starts to-day on the career of an immortal. 
 His mortal house is clothed upon with his house which is from heaven. 
 He lives as an immortal lives. He opens a window into the infinite, 
 through this dead, blank wall which did shut oft' his prospect. He 
 changes the focus of his camera, and his foreground is no longer dis- 
 torted and twisted. And, while he does this, he finds that that third 
 element of an immortal's life takes on certainty. What Paul calls 
 Hope, by which he means living in the future while a man lives in to- 
 day, is all the time growing stronger and more a thing of course were 
 it only by exercise. He uses what he has, and because he uses it, he 
 has more. 
 
 1 was talking to a near friend of the English General Gordon since he 
 died, and in a downcast way, which I will confess was time-born and 
 time-bred, I said sadly enough, that it seemed a pity that such a life as 
 that, so devoted to the noblest purpose, should be cut short almost at 
 the moment of success, because a lying Arab stole in behind him, and 
 smote him to his death, when he could not defend himself. His friend 
 had caught so much of his spirit, that he turned on me almost as if I 
 had spoken blasphemy. " Oh, no! " he cried, * he would never have 
 said that himself. Why, he was for himself eager for the larger life.
 
 100 EASTER. 
 
 And you could have pleased him no more than to show to him that it was 
 coming soon. And see t:>-day," he added, " how much more power he has 
 over men, to lead them as he will, than he had only a year ago ! " This does 
 not mean, as Paul says so wisely, that Gordon sought to be unclothed. 
 He had no wish to throw his life away. No, it is the wish " to be 
 clothed upon ; " to have one's earthly life and work so built upon, so 
 glorified and aggrandized by the large powers of an infinite existence, 
 that one may subdue the things of life, food, clothing, luxury, monev, 
 houses, land and the rest, and keep them under entirely. So one shall 
 command principalities and powers, things present and to come. " Ye 
 shall tread on serpents and scorpions, and nothing shall by any means 
 hurt you." 
 
 -To think of to-day's work as a part of the infinite work, to speak 
 even of to-day's affair as belonging in the service one is to render 
 twenty centuries hence, this is an immortal's habit. An early friend of 
 mine, whom I tried to describe under the name of Harry Wadsworth, 
 and whom some of you young people know by that name, had this 
 habit so completely that I find old friends of his speaking of him, as 
 if that were perhaps the characteristic by which most often they remem- 
 bered him. As a man who has lived in China and is going to live there 
 again, unconsciously speaks with a different measurement of Suffolk 
 county and of Boston, though he never allude to a detail in that other 
 home of his, so such men impress you as having lived in heaven and 
 meaning to live there again. And here the comparison fails us. For the 
 reason whv such men and women give this impression, is that they live 
 in heaven now. For as a man may be a son of Massachusetts, and at 
 the same time be a loyal citizen of the United States, yes, and may give 
 to the National Administration the larger part of his thought and care, 
 almost forgetting that there are Massachusetts politics or administration ; 
 so a man on this earth may be so interested in Faith and Hope and 
 Love, which are the infinite elements of Eternal being, that what is 
 merely earthly, eating ami drinking and sleeping, shall be quite subor- 
 dinate. And this double life, shall I call it? is what Paul means, when 
 he says the life on earth is clothed upon with our life which is from 
 heaven. 
 
 And if it so happen to any of us, that, in the course of promotion from 
 world to world, one of our very nearest friends, whose life is all knit
 
 IMMORTAL. 101 
 
 into our life, is called from service here to higher service there, then we 
 are called to a communion with heaven, whether we would or no, and 
 at least in the thought of him who has gone before us, we are living as 
 immortals live. Mrs. Stowe has well said of the death of children, that 
 there is hardly one household, where the gulf between this world and 
 the other world has not been bridged over when such a child, so dear, 
 so sure to be remembered, passed from shore to shore. " Where my 
 treasure is, my heart is." And, as one after another leave me here, I 
 am the more apt, whether I meant it or no, to cross over, were it only 
 in my questionings and imaginations, to ask them questions, or to ask 
 God questions about them, and I am the more apt, in .the twilight, to 
 sit and wait for the help that they have asked from God for me, and 
 which is sure to come. Because they have left me, I am the more 
 sure to live the lite of Faith, of Hope, and of Love. 
 
 LEaster morning does not prove man's immortality. It asserts it. In 
 the universe:! resurrection from the night of winter, as Life returns which 
 has been sL-cping or shrouded, it asserts man's communion and com- 
 panionship with the God who is life : and it declares that man, who is 
 child of God, cannot die. Because he is immortal he can adjust his life 
 with the Infinite Perspective. Because he is immortal, he can come to 
 his God as an nnmertal comes, can speak, can listen and can reply 
 again. Because he is immortal, he arranges his duties 0:1 the scale of 
 immortality. He begins if he chooses, on what shall task him a thou- 
 sand years to finish : he enters on this enterprise or that, perfectly sure 
 that he has infinite allies. Is one of these allies called away so that lie 
 does not see his face? It is as a fellow officer might be sent on other 
 service in the campaign, whom he is t> meet again in the hour of 
 ^victory. Because he is immortal, hj lives with these and for these 
 who also are immortal. They have perhaps help for him, he has per- 
 haps help for them. Help or n:>t, each has for each, companionship, 
 and it is not to be that they are t > grind along through ages of ages, 
 stupid and alone. 
 
 To renew such immortal life here, of Faith and Hope and Love, is 
 the mission every year of Easter Day. That this which is mortal may 
 be clothed upon witli immortality.^]
 
 LISTENING. 
 
 BY W. C. GANNETT. 
 
 I HEAR it often in the dark, 
 
 I hear it in the light, 
 Where is the voice that calls to me 
 
 With such a quiet might? 
 It seems but echo to my thought 
 
 And yet beyond the stars ; 
 It seems a heart-beat in a hush, 
 
 And yet the planet jars ! 
 
 Oh, may it be that far within 
 
 My inmost soul there lies 
 A spirit-sky that opens with 
 
 Those voices of surprise ? 
 And can it be, by night and day, 
 
 That firmament serene 
 Is just the heaven where God himself, 
 
 The Father, dwells unseen ? 
 
 O God within,' so close to me 
 
 That every thought is plain, 
 Be judge, be friend, be Father still 
 
 And in Thy heaven reign ! 
 My heaven is mine, my very soul, 
 
 Thy words are sweet and strong, 
 They fill my inward silences 
 
 With Music and with Song. 
 
 They send me challenges to right 
 
 And loud rebuke my ill, 
 They ring my bells of victory, 
 
 They breathe my " Peace, be still ! " 
 They ever seem to say, "Mv child, 
 
 Why seek Me so all day? 
 Now journey inward to thyself 
 
 And listen by the way."
 
 MANY HOMES, 
 
 " In my Father's house are many mansions. If it were not so, I would have toid you; foi 
 I go to prepare a place for you." JOHN xiv, 2. 
 
 As the declaration in which the Saviour lifted the curtain highest, 
 the text is studied, of course, with curious, even anxious, interest. 
 There is, it seems, a heaven for each of us, whatever his mood or his 
 attainment ; and it seems that, as Jesus thought of it, these might be 
 quite different each from each. One thing more, which our stately 
 word kk mansion " does not teach, but which appears distinctly in the 
 original text, and in all that Jesus ever says of heaven, these places 
 which he prepares are so many homes. Your home is ready for you, 
 mine for n:e. The text would be better rendered, indeed, if we read. 
 " In my Father's house are many homes." 
 
 i. Whatever we know, and whatever we believe, of these homes, 
 on the other side of the line, is, as St. Paul says, spiritually known ami 
 " spiritually judged." To Jesus Christ, living in the Spirit of God, 
 led by the Spirit. ^-or, as we say, leading a life wholly spiritual, the 
 whole sense of these realities, what I may call the sight of them, the 
 hearing and conception of them, was perfectly clear. To us it is clear 
 or not clear, strong or faint, according as our lives are lives of the spirit 
 or of the flesh ; according as we live for things that die, or for the 
 three realities which endure. 
 
 And here is the answer to the frequent question, why Jesus Christ 
 himself, \\ith his clear vision of the infinite life, gave us no more de- 
 scription of it, nor other pictures of it, than are in these words. What 
 is the use of pictures to a person who cannot see, or of descriptions to 
 one who cannot understand? I could throw upon the wall yonder, 
 from ." ca";cn obscura* a perfect picture of the Temple of the Partbe- 
 
 (103)
 
 104 EASTKK. 
 
 non. But while your backs were turned to it you could not sec it : 
 nay, even if I begged you to turn round, and you complied, you could 
 not see while the church was all aglow with this light ; while you were 
 looking upon each other in this sunlight. The image is there, but it is 
 an image you cannot discern. Only a few of those nearest could just 
 make out some of its leading lines, its highest lights and deepest shades. 
 It would not be till we had screened oft all the cross-lights from our 
 own sunshine ; till we could no longer see carpet, cushion, chandelier, 
 persons, or anything around, that the picture there would be clear, and 
 sharp, and real. No revealer can reveal anything to us which we have 
 not the spiritual power at least to apprehend, and in a measure to com- 
 prehend. If you want pictures of heaven you must go to Mahomet, or 
 to those expounders of Christianity who adopt the fashions of Mahomet. 
 He will give you flowers and gardens to your taste ; but even he can do no 
 more than meet the taste he finds. Jesus reserves what he might have 
 said, because unless those who heard him are of spiritual life, habit, and 
 experience, which is to say, unless they are exercised in Faith, Hooe, 
 and Love, why, they cannot understand, see, or hear of the spiritual 
 heaven, of a heaven of Faith, Hope, and Love. He did not make, there- 
 fore, the fatal error which teachers of children make, who, with a poor 
 earthly fancy, describe to the poor little things that before which the lofti- 
 est heavenly imagination is silent, a mistake which, if it has any fruit, 
 results in binding them for years to a heaven which is only a garden, or 
 only a shop of jewels, or a king's palace, according as the childish alle- 
 gory may have taught them. 
 
 I think t'".at some of those who hear me may remember the * Child's 
 Book of the Soul," the name of which carried it into Sunday-school 
 libraries a generation ago. The amiable and well-meaning author, 
 himself, indeed, a practical philosopher of no mean power, attempted 
 the impossible. He would describe the indescribable. He would 
 define the infinite. So he bade his unfortunate little readers take their 
 school slates, and with short marks of the slate-pencil, crowded as close 
 as possible together, cover, first one side, and then the other. Then he 
 bade them imagine all the children who ever lived in the world, since 
 the world began, using the whole of their lives, through all the period 
 known to history, by marking slates in this manner. Then he bade 
 them fancv that each mark on each slate represented a thousand million
 
 MANY HOMES. "lOS 
 
 years of human existence. And you anticipate the sublime close of the 
 highly elaborated chapter, as it told these little children that all the 
 white marks on all the slates, representing all these congeries of thou- 
 sands of millions of years, would amount literally to nothing in com- 
 parison to the infinite existence of God's children living with him. Of 
 all such elaborate efibrt, for what the fortunate slang of our time calls 
 " materialization," an English critic said, h;:ppily, that the very best 
 you could hope, after the little children had struggled through this 
 chapter, would be that they should always think of heaven as a gigantic 
 slate quarry, in which they should live forever. 
 
 And such, in truth, is the result of any human efibrt. by anv human 
 language, to describe that which is in itself, of its very essence, purely 
 spiritual. The description of a spiritual heaven, though it were per- 
 fectly wrought out by an archangel, would be as unintelligible to the 
 carnal mind as the heaven itself. 
 
 So is it that the only statement of detail which the Saviour gives is 
 this in the text ; which translated into our habit of speech, says this, 
 that whatever be the heaven which we are prepared for when we pass 
 from this world that spiritual life we shall have. Our homes are there 
 such as we ourselves have made them. If your highest joy be the 
 counting out of rubies, or the dressing your person with diamonds. 
 Omnipotence itself will not force you into life more spiritual. There 
 are many mansions there. That is to say, the economy of the life 
 before us is the same as that of life here in its variety, and in its adapta- 
 tion to each separate soul. 
 
 This is the Christian statement of life without these bodies, of the 
 future life. It diriers wholly from the best speculations which it found 
 in the world. As widely does it ditler from what I am tempted to call 
 the " half-and-half statements " of to-day. Do we not hear speculations 
 from people who think of God from their knowledge of what men have 
 been? Such a man if God had let such a man stand by him when 
 human life began would take for granted, at once, that the world was 
 always to be peopled with myriads of exact duplicates of Adam, all 
 exactly alike, and all mechanically pulsing at the beat of one heart- 
 throb. That seems to be mechanical man's highest notion of the high- 
 est victory. A million clocks of the same pattern, of which all the 
 parts are mutually inter-changeable ! An army of perfectly drilled
 
 IO6 EASTER. 
 
 soldiers ! A factory of consentaneous looms ! And so, mechanical man, 
 in his uniform, shoe-last conception, can frame for himself no better 
 notion of heaven than that it is an ocean of God, into which, bit by bit, 
 we melt away. Here we are, blocks of ice, such men tell us, which, 
 in that life, will melt back into the one ocean which shall engulf us all. 
 
 But, as you see, the Christian statement is not hampered by any such 
 pettiness of the slate-quarry or of the machine-shop. The God who 
 chooses to make this world a world of unity in variety ; a world whose 
 countless forests aic made of countless trees, of which the countless 
 leaves are never twice the same ; a world of men, each differing from 
 each , and each free ; the God whose grandeur is so much greater than our 
 grandeur, whose success is so much more successful than our success, 
 and whose variety is so infinitely beyond our tame uniformity, this God 
 chooses for his heaven the same infinity of ornament and design. One 
 star of it differs from another star in glory. Each angel life in it differs 
 from each other life. So, for each life, there is a different mansion. 
 " In my Father's house are many homes." 
 
 Just as, on earth, the boy and his father, the girl and her mother, 
 the oldest child in a family, the second child and the youngest child ; 
 the sick and the well, the old and the young, live in spheres different 
 each from each, so in all life, life there and here, each shall find himself 
 in his own home, bearing his own character, and living his own life. 
 Because love is one of the three elements of heaven these homes are 
 homes of mutual life. As there is society here so there is there ; 
 sympathy here and sympathy there ; kindred hearts fuse together here 
 and they fuse together there. But the mansions are different mansions 
 there as here. It is no ghastly caravansary, poorhouse, or palace, where 
 Room 99 is like Room i , and Room 1000 like Room 99. It is a myriad 
 multitude of Homes. There are many spheres of duty, many voices 
 in chorus. There are different trees to water if you call it a garden 
 and different flowers to train, as in the old paradise, where, when Adam 
 
 " Taught the tangled ivy how to climb, 
 Eve, in a wild of roses, intermixed with myrtle, 
 Found what to redress till noon." 
 
 2. All this is of interest to us, as it gives us help in to-day's calami- 
 ties, and incentive and life in to-day's duties. Wherever any man is in 
 his spiritual life, just there is heaven ready for him noiv. Just there.
 
 MANY HOMES. IOJ 
 
 and so does he conceive it ; and, for all the purposes of his well-being, 
 he conceives it in the best possible way, he conceives it rightly. Not, 
 of course, that it is a complete or adequate conception ; but it is as 
 much as will do him any good. For all the intents and purposes of his 
 advancement this is his heaven. 
 
 Describe heaven for another, and insist on your description. whether 
 it be a heaven of harps, like Dr. Watts's, or of piano-fortes, like a more 
 modern author's of our own time, you drive your pupil right away 
 from it, unless he, be a precise counterpart of yourself who make the 
 description. An eager student will tell a child that in heaven he shall 
 always learn ; and the child, hating book-learning, really dreads such 
 a heaven. An eager spirit, always on the alert, preaches that in 
 heaven there shall be no pause in its activity. Heaven, like earth, is to 
 be eager planning, forward marching, and every Success a stepping- 
 stone for new plans and other marches. What a wound is this to the 
 aged heart which has tossed long enough in the gales of life to be longing 
 for a harbor ! The best story they tell of Calvin, and one which does 
 something to redeem him in our affections, is the story which tells of 
 his quick insight when some such contriver had been describing heaven 
 to him. This teacher described to him the golden glass which was the 
 floor of heaven, and told him he was to look down through its trans- 
 parency and enjoy the sight of the sufferings of the damned in the abyss 
 below. The young Calvin was child of God enough to answer in scorn, 
 k> I had rather live with the damned below than with the saints above 
 in such a heaven as that is." And we need not go back for such anec- 
 dotes three hundred years. I am afraid that many of us can remember 
 the gloom which has fallen upon our exuberant youth, when exuberant 
 youth was taught that heaven was a place of eternal Sunday, or that 
 the saints are to have no occupation there but the perpetual singing ot 
 psalms. 
 
 Such is the result, and a deserved result, of the best pictures your poor 
 fancy can paint, if you are bigot enough, after the fashion of creed-mak- 
 ers, to try to fix them, and to say this is all just so. For its stimulus, 
 for its faith, for its hope, and for perfect love, tKe soul wishes to enter 
 not your heaven, but its own. The Saviour knows this when he says, 
 " In my Father's house are many homes." 
 
 Do not let me obtrude upon boy or girl in any such bigotry, by telling
 
 IOS EASTER. 
 
 of my own boyish imaginings. Rather I may help boy or girl if I can 
 make them understand how as one grows in years and in strength, as 
 this world grows larger, the other world grows larger too. For I can 
 go far enough back to recollect and to thank the bright Sunday-school 
 teacher, who. when we children had asked some unanswerable question, 
 had the wit to stimulate our childish imaginings, by telling us that, when 
 we came to heaven, we might ourselves talk with the actors in earth's 
 eventful scenes, and that they then should tell us what we did not know. 
 Noah should tell us of the flood ; Romulus, how he built his walls ; and 
 Leonida^. of the defence of Thermopyhr. With the inquiring mind of 
 ;i child, eager for more information, heaven Io thus the home where he 
 shall know everything. But time passed on, and the little sister, who 
 was my playmate and companion, died of a sudden and went before me 
 there. Then I saw, then I knew ; this Bible taught me, if nothing elre 
 taught me, that when my turn came I should be with her. From that 
 hour to this hour heaven has been to me the place of companionship. 
 Knowledge? Yes, I suppose so. New senses? Yes. New senses not 
 to be counted in place of these somewhat cumbrous five. But it is not 
 such images which come first to him who has loved and who has said 
 good-by. To that man heaven is more and more as life goes on the 
 life where he is to be with him or her, her an.l him who have been the 
 blessing of life here ; from whom he has been parted, but whom he lias 
 
 not lost : 
 
 " For love is heaven, and heaven is love." 
 
 St. John, in Patmos, where his island was a prison, of which the 
 ocean forged the chains, speaks of heaven in exultation, to say, " The 
 sea is no more ! " You must not quote that outburst of a prisoner to 
 him who is just emancipated from his daily toil, and stam.s upon the 
 sea-beach to look at the unbounded horizon for the first time in his in.-. 
 and drink in some notion of eternity and inf.nitv. To the prisoner 
 heaven is freedom. To the wanderer it is his father's house. To the 
 ignorant it is learning. To the bookworm it is simplicity. To this 
 poor, lame boy, to that weak, deformed girl, it is the roving free through 
 limitle: s existence. To the slave, worn under the lash, it is a world 
 without labor. To the weary it is rest. To the sanguine it is action. 
 To the doubtful it is truth. To the struggling it is peace. To the sick 
 it is health. To him who is careworn, distressed, pulled hither and
 
 MANY HOMES. 109 
 
 thither, with not a moment he can call his own, it is eternity ; that is to 
 say, it is life without time ; where there are no minutes, no hours, no 
 days, and no years ; no late, no early, no tedious, no slow, no thought 
 nor care for time. 
 
 Nor is it true that these conceptions of heaven weaken each other, be- 
 cause they thus contradict each other. 
 
 Those who are eager to find action in heaven need not fear but there 
 will be motive enough, effort enough, in life which reaches from one 
 side of eternity to the other. Duty there must be where there are God's 
 children with their father. But, this is the promise, that whether the 
 faithful spirit, sent on some errand, pass from one end of heaven to the 
 other, or whether he sit at the footstool, as those do who serve while 
 they wait, there is no more wear and tear, no more fatigue for him. 
 He shall ' rest from his labors." And this is the promise all along ; the 
 spirit remains, but the limitation is gone. The mind could once be 
 cramped by a fevered brain, or bv paralyzed fingers ; but now it is free ! 
 The soul may soar to the top wing-beat of its noblest aspirations, and 
 never outwear itself in its ehort ; yet, it shall all the while be resting in 
 its Father's smile. These pests of earth, fatigue, nervous exhaustion, 
 unrest, with all the attendant despairs and melancholies, powers of 
 evil, as the poets well call them, which may haunt us all the closer as 
 our effort is the nobler, belong in this life ; because this life means part- 
 nership of a finite body and an infinite soul. The soul starts in the 
 morning on an angel's work ; and the body, too, has it not been made 
 by an Almighty Hand? boldly takes up the soul's instructions, bravely 
 follows on hour after hour, till time tells. It quivers, wavers, faints, 
 fails. Why not? How else? It is clay at best. Earth-made! And 
 this poor soul inspires it as it can, fans its faintness as it can, cheers it 
 as it can, braces it to the angel duty yet undone. As a hunted prince 
 in the desert nibs down the legs of his failing steed, and bathes his 
 mouth, the willing soul keeps the poor body up to the last. But they 
 are yoked unequally ; they are of difierent nature ; and at last the poor 
 body must fall back to sleep, to rest, to be recreated and recruited, be- 
 fore, with another morning, it can begin again. The flying steed is 
 yoked to an earthly roadster. He can inspirit him, but he cannot teach 
 him to fly. This is the only fatigue a true man ought to know. For 
 that other ennui . of the man who stands all day idle, no true man ought
 
 I 10 EASTEH. 
 
 to know. You are worn down, because your plans are beyond the 
 power of your engine. Driven even to its quickest, when you say you 
 have but just begun, it has to stop till it can cool down. The heated 
 metal must relax. The parts must take their old places before you can 
 drive it again at full steam. 
 
 From such a life, so limited, hampered, thwarted, the infinite soul 
 springs, at death, into the heaven where it is held in no such bondage. 
 It may move forever on the swiftest wings, side by side with God's 
 own spiritual laws, woven in with them. It comprehends them. It 
 works with them, unfettered now, and easy. It is not strange that that 
 soul finds a heaven which is at once the home of rest and of duty ! 
 
 I may speak, then, of contrasted pictures, without hazarding their 
 possibility. 
 
 i Return from these to the imaginations of the more devout poets, 
 which till now 1 have passed by. 
 
 Here is the prayer of Festus, in the poem now forgotten. Like all 
 the impuie in heart, who would fain be pure, he cries : 
 
 " I could not look on Thee whate'er I was, 
 So when we had winged through Thy wide world of things 
 And seen stars made and saved, destroyed and judged, 
 I said, and trembled lest Thou shouldst not hear me 
 
 And make Thyself right ready to forgive, 
 1 will see God, before I die, in heaven." 
 
 And Dante, toiling on from that dark forest, where in middle life he 
 was lost, led by sage to sage, from step to step, from saint to saint, even 
 from world to world, finds heaven at last : 
 
 " When with close heed, suspense and motionless, 
 Wondering I fixed so earnestly my ken 
 On the everlasting splendor." 
 
 These pictures are drawn from the highest flights of faith. Their 
 prototypes are in the gospels and in the epistles, where the pure in 
 heart, as the crown of their eternal quest, see God. 
 
 It is only before the Spirit comes that James and John wish to sit, 
 the one on the right hand and the other on the left of the Lord. In their 
 later lives, the younger James says, " Be patient, brethren, until the
 
 MANY HOMES. Ill 
 
 coming of the Lord. Behold the husbandman waiteth for the precious 
 fruit of the earth, being long patient over it, until it receive the early and 
 latter rain." His heaven is a ripe fruit, which these showers and these 
 suns have matured. 
 
 Peter's heaven is ' An inheritance incorruptible, and that fadeth not 
 away." 
 
 John whispers, or sings, Beloved, now are we children of God, 
 and it is not yet made manifest what we shall be. We kno\v that if he 
 shall be manifested we shall be like him ; for we shall see him even as 
 he is." 
 
 Paul, practical always and seeking some result, is " in a strait betwixt 
 the two ; having the desire to depart and to be with Christ, for it is very 
 far better." 
 
 Stephen cries, " I see the heavens open, and a son of man stand at 
 the right hand of God." 
 
 All of them drinking in something of the spirit of the Master: ' I 
 have a fire to be lighted, and how I wish that it were already kindled ! 
 I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened till it be 
 accomplished ! " His heaven is looking from his Father's presence on 
 a world warmed, lighted, and redeemed. 
 
 And here I have cited only one or two among the thousands upon 
 thousands of imaginations of heaven with which Saviour, prophet, poet, 
 and martyr would have supplied us. Among them all I may hardly 
 more than once have struck the key-note for your idea of heaven or 
 yours ; for as on earth there are many homes, no two quite alike, so in 
 heaven there are many homes, and no one the same as another. As be- 
 tween these earthly homes there is the quickest sympathy and the closest 
 love, if only the kingdom of heaven is at hand ; so between those myriad 
 homes of that other life ; and among them all there is one spirit, and 
 they are made perfect in one ! So is it that each soul of us here, for his 
 own cheer, for his own help, for his own training, has, if he be faithful, 
 pure, and wise, the idea or vision of heaven which for him is best at 
 this moment. It is not for me to paint your picture, nor for you to 
 paint mine. For it is thus that to you and me God is pleased to give 
 one more stimulus for our upward way. When I lay me down to 
 sleep, and pray God to take my soul if I die before the morning, it is n >t 
 to any strange city, unknown to me and unknowable. The homo t'lat
 
 i!2 EASTER. 
 
 is offered me is the mansion for which I am ready, and the heaven which 
 I vaguely dream of to-day is the heaven which shall be mine to-morrow. 
 
 And to any man who comes to me, and says that .he has found no sat- 
 isfactory conception of heaven, I should say that probablv he has been 
 seeking the image, instead of the reality. We cannot lk imagine," we 
 cannot clothe in images, that which our Lord himself did not choose to 
 picture, to describe, to image, or to define. Let a man rather devote 
 himself to making simpler his idea of God and of his own soul. Let 
 him accustom himself to the thought, that, as his soul uses this bodv, 
 so it may use other bodies of higher power, with senses we have not 
 yet attained to ; unlimited, indeed, in their range and sohere. What 
 the limitations of earth are, we know, alas ! too well. But yet we are 
 able to conceive of God as free from these limitations. Nay, we free 
 ourselves from them as we plan for our own future and set in order its 
 activities. And here is the promise to you and to me : that what we 
 need is ours. What we have gained is ours. For our labor, rest. For 
 our hunger, food. For our thirst, the water of life. For our love, such 
 love as Christ's ; as all good angels' ; as the very love of God. And n > 
 man is to fear that he is not ready for the place. What the Saviour 
 went for was to prepare the place for him. What place I am fit for 
 that place I find. 
 
 In mv Father's house are many homes!
 
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