of our Easter-that which shows us what we shall be, so many of us as shall'obtain that world and the resurrection of the dead.' But this thought is only interesting to those who shall have listened to the voice of Easter as it sounds in the living ear, Christ is risen-with Him rise.2

Rise out of this entangling, this down-dragging present. Seek, think, live the things above.3 He died for all-for all He rose and ascended, that we too in heart and mind might ascend with Him and with Him continually dwell. 'Because I live, ye shall live also '-first the life of the spiritual mind here, hereafter the life of the spiritual body in heaven.

1 Luke xx. 35.

2 Eph. ii. 6.

EASTER DAY,

3 Col. iii. 1, 2.

April 17, 1892.

V.

NOT HERE-YET WITH YOU ALWAY.

Matthew xxviii. 6, 20.

He is not here: for He is risen, as He said.

Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world

Two brief sayings. Together they give us the doctrine of Easter-what it takes away, and what it gives in the place of it.

St. Matthew is the scantiest of the Evangelists in the record of the appearances. St. Mark, St. Luke, St. John, each one is fuller than St. Matthew in the number and in the detail of his narratives of the Resurrection. But have we not in these two brief sayings-the one negative, the other positive-the one an Angel's saying, the other a saying of the Risen Lord Himself— a whole treasury of divine instruction in this mystery of mysteries, the life after death-the life for us -of the Son of God?

'Not here,' said the Angel, and he pointed to

the empty tomb. To the first hearers it was a message of disappointment. Those to whom it was spoken had come to complete the hasty burial. They had mourned and wept through a long yesterday-the last of many hundreds and thousands of Sabbaths: unknown to them, this is Sunday, the first of many hundreds and thousands of Sundays: and it is to dawn upon them with a cruel rebuff-'He is not here'not where you so confidently thought to find Him-not where you can pay Him these loving ministries on which you have lavished so many thoughts and tears and hopes-' He is not here.' They must learn a new lesson. How often do our deepest joys spring out of our keenest He is not here-why? Because He is risen.Ye now therefore have sorrow: but your sorrow shall (not be turned into, but) itself become joy.'

sorrows.

My brethren, there are those who still seek Jesus Christ in the grave. It may be the grave of some lost joy, some defeated ambition, some disappointed hope, some buried love. Their dwelling is in the tombs. A depressed spirit, a morbid melancholy, a living death, is theirs henceforth: they acquiesce in it, they foster it, they learn to like it, they are half proud of it. Some of them, the more religious of them, look for Christ in it: there is a pathos in this kind of

dying life which they take (and perhaps do not wholly mistake) for piety. But O for the Angel's voice to them, He is not here! not in the tombs of earth's graveyard, many as they are, vast as it is natural as it is to water them with tears, to deck it with flowers: 'He is not here, He is risen '-ask what that means.

There are others, and they too are many, who live not in the tombs, but in the tomb-the tomb of Christ Himself. Their Christian year begins and ends with Good Friday. Their religion stops short of Easter Day: Ascension Day and Whit Sunday are blank days in their calendar. They hear St. Paul say, 'Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us:' but they never draw his inference, 'Therefore let us keep the feast-therefore let ours be the festival life, the life of the redeemed and the forgiven, standing fast and pressing onward in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. To forget the things behind, sins repented of and forsaken, they would count presumptuous. To reach forth to things before, work to be done for Christ, powers to be stirred up, graces to be exercised, they would count, for the like of them, an unbecoming and an unwarrantable ambition. They cannot enter into the grand resolution written in the life of one holy man of this century, Then, if Jesus Christ bore the sins

of the world, my sins shall not be on my own head another hour.' Still less can they go on to say with him, and never afterwards to go back from it—' And they were not.' Was this presumption? Was it anything more than just to accept and to realize the Angel's message, 'He is not here'-not left in the grave-' for He is risen?' there seek Him, there live with Him, where He is alive for evermore.

'He is not here.' The text is manifold in its applications. One passing thought might be given to the obvious reflexion, Not in Jerusalem, not in Judæa, not in Palestine.

It is the consolation of those who cannot go and see for themselves the towns and the villages, the lakes and the hills, which the Son of God beautified by His presence, by the miracles which He wrought and by the pains which He endured, when for us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven and was made man.

They tell us, who have enjoyed the privilege of such travel, that the stayers at home have lost but little in the realization of the life of lives, of the death of deaths. The very identification of the holy places is precarious. Who shall believe, for example, that Calvary and the rich man's grave (to take but those two) can be covered by one dome of a Temple Church like