Seven Signs

of our Resurrection.

EPHESIANS, V., 14.

"Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light."

WHEN Paul wrote the fifteenth chapter of First Corinthians, Christ had already called the ruler's little daughter back to life before she was cold. He had met the pall-bearers of the widow's son, and spoken him into life again. After four days He had stood at the tomb of His friend, Lazarus, and cried aloud, and he had heard, and come forth. He Himself, after three days, had risen from the sealed and guarded sepulchre to die no more. But after witnessing to these facts, Paul points to the signs and symbols of

our resurrection," which are visible in the analogies of nature, and of which we are conscious in our inmost souls. We follow his plan in considering seven signs and suggestions of our own resurrection.

I. Faith in the scriptural record partially solves the mystery of death.

What god-like relation can the everliving, life-giving,changeless God hold to creatures who partake not of His life? Our Lord says, "All live unto Him." With Him death is not. The little life which burns within the body glows unquenchable in His all-seeing eyes. If He could forget us for a moment, then, indeed, death would be; -but unto Him we live! The beloved pass from our sight, but they pass not from His. What we call death is but a form in the eyes of men. It looks something final, an awful cessation, an utter change. But if God could see us before we were, and make us after his ideal, that we shall have passed from the eyes of our friends can be no argument that He beholds us no longer-"for all live unto Him."

Let the change come, and let [it] be ever so great and imposing; let the unseen life be ever so vague to our conceptions, it is not against reason to hope that God could see Abraham after Isaac had ceased to see him ; see Isaac after Jacob had ceased to see him; see Jacob after some of the Sadducees had begun to doubt whether there had ever been a Jacob at all. He remembers them; that is, he carries them in His mind. He of whom God thinks, lives. He takes to Himself the name of their God. The Living One cannot name Himself, after the dead, when the very Godhead lies in the giving of life; therefore, they must be alive.

2. The day-dawn from darkness is a symbol of our resurrection from death.

The world is full of resurrections. Every night that folds us up in the darkness is a death; and those men who have been out early and have seen the first of the dawn will know it-the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life. But it is yet more of a resurrection to men. They die, as it were, every night. The death of darkness comes down over the earth; but a deeper death, the death of sleep, descends on them. But the God of the resurrection is awake all the time watching His sleeping men, women, and children, even as a mother watcheth her sleeping babe, only with larger eyes and more full of love than hers. But before they know how, or what, or where, they are awake again, and they rise up from the death of sleep. So from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, from helplessness to activity; is not this, at least, one symbol that hints at our resurrection? 3. Spring following winter is a similitude of our resurrection.

Look at the death that falls upon

the world in winter. And look how it revives when the sun draws near enough in the spring to wile the life in it once more out of its grave. See how the pale, meek, snow-drops come up with their heads bowed, as if full of the memory of the fierce winds, and yet ready in the strength of their weakness to encounter them again. Up come the primroses and bluebells, and a thousand other children of the spring, to hear the resurrection-trumpet as it blows in the soft wind from the South; and they obey, and leave their graves behind to breathe the air of the sweet heavens. Up, and up, they come, till the world is made glorious and men are made glad with lily, and rose, and tree, and flower, and fruit. The very sky shares in the grand resurrection. The garments of its mourning are swept away, and instead the sky has put on the garments of praise. Her blue, colored after the sapphire-floor, on which stands the throne of Him who is the Resurrection and the Life, is dashed and glorified with the pure white of sailing clouds, and, at morning and evening prayers, puts on colors which delight the eyes of men and angelsgreen, gold, purple, and rose. This is, at least, another similitude of our resurrection, in which glows a gleam of the hope of immortality.

4. A likeness of our resurrection is reflected in the life of the frailest insect.

Look at the story of a butterfly's life-so plain that the pagan Greek called it and the soul by the same name, Psyche. Look how the creeping thing, so ugly to our eyes that we shudder to handle it, finding itself growing sick with age, straightway falls to spinning and weaving its own shroud, coffin, and grave all in one-to prepare, in fact, for its resurrection, for it is for the sake of

the resurrection that death exists. Patiently it spins its strength, but not its life, away, folds itself up decently, that its body may rest in quiet till the new body is formed within it, and, last, when the appointed hour has come, out of the body of this thing breaks forth the winged splendour of the butterfly! Just as Paul tells us that it is not the same body we have in the resurrection, but a nobler body with all the imperfect, the evil of the present body taken away. No more creeping feet, but wings of splendour now. For the frailest of God's creatures to have risen from the most loathsome to the loveliest, is, indeed, one more hint that we mortal men— worms of the dust-may rise on the resurrection day to be angels of light.

5. Our resurrection after death is set forth in our resurrection from the moral death of sin.

If into the face of the dead body, lying on the bed waiting for its burial, the departed soul should draw near again from afar to look out once more from those eyes, to smile again through those lips, the change on the face would be, indeed, great and wondrous, but nothing for marvel or greatness to that which passes on the countenance, or the inward spiritual face of the man who wakes from his sleep of selfishness and arises from his death in sin and receives light and life from Christ. It may take a long time for the new spirit to complete itself, but it begins at once and will be perfected. The heart, which cared for but itself, becomes aware of other hearts like itself and feels a desire, never felt before, to love and be loved. From selfishness to love, is not this a resurrection from the dead?

6. Moral transformations, from evil to good in this life, typify our resurrection and transformation in the life to come.

Men live whose desires are to subject every innocent, good, pure, and lovely thing in life to their own sensuous gratification. But a pang of light and a stroke of unseen power smites the heart; an arrow of truth, feathered with suffering, and loss, and dismay, finds out the joint in the cold, worldly coffin of sin, where the heart lies festering in death, so dead that itself calls it life. He trembles, he awakes, he rises, unto newness of life. He to whom, but yesterday, the mass of his fellows was common and unclean, bows to-day before the least of his Maker's handiwork. The sun, which was to him but a candle with which to search after his own ends, wealth, power, place, praise-the world, which was but the cavern where he thus searched-is now full of the mystery of loveliness, while land and sea are become to him but the symbols and signs of truth. From a withered old age of unbelief he is raised up a child, full of admiration, and wonder, and gladness. thing is glorious to him; he can believe, and, therefore, he sees. To come out of the ugly into the beautiful; out of the mean and selfish into the noble and loving; out of the paltry into the great; out of the false into the true; out of the filthy into the clean; out of the sinner into the saint-is not this a resurrection ?— a resurrection as mighty as from a rock-fettered tomb!

Every

7. What God has commenced in us of love and hope, demands that we have a resurrection and an eternity for its completion and gratification.

Shall God be the God of the families of the earth, and shall the love that He has thus created towards father and mother, brother and sister, wife and child, go moaning and longing to all eternity; or worse, far worse, die out of our bosoms? Shall God be God

and this be the end?

No, our capacity for friendship and affection is in no sense earth-limited, but is an undoubted inheritance of the resurrection life.. Certain it is that this capacity far transcends its earthly opportunities of growth and enjoyment. Why has the Lord placed these sweet cups of human friendship and love to our lips, if to taste them is to dash them into the rocky tomb?

ever.

In this very susceptibility to friendship the assurance is hidden that we are laying up treasures for our heavenly life, providing that it shall be ours for Whenever the painfully vivid thoughts of dear ones long ago departed come over us, let it be as a breath on the weird harp of prophecy, of that home beyond the resurrection, wherein

"Bright gates inscribed,' No more to part,' Soul springs to soul and heart unites with heart."

After all our analogies fail, and all reasonings cease to give us full assurance, we come back, and at the base of Christ's broken sepulchre we plant the ladder that reaches from earth to heaven. Upon that ladder, each rung stained with blood, He went up by toil and agony to His reward. In like manner we must go up to the fruit of our deeds and the fruition of our hopes. Such desires would have been strangers to our hearts if the word of God had not hinted at their fulfilment. surely there lives not a man in whom, during his better moments, there is no feeling of affinity with the brightest angel of light. To create such lofty aspirations implies the responsibility to cherish them. No home will satisfy save the heart of God. Therefore Christ, in his loftiest address to His beloved disciples, gave the fullest assurance, that "in His Father's house wer many mansions."

For

C. S. BLACKwell.

The Relational Emotions

in Christianity.

LUKE xiv. 25, 26.

"And there went great multitudes with Him, and He turned and said unto them, if any man come to Me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple."

Was there ever known such a rebuff as this? Crowds having come out to hear the Saviour, and to honour Him, He turned round and said to them, "Unless a man leave everything that is sacred on earth, and as the very climax hate himself, he cannot be My disciple."

That took place then which has taken place in our day, and in every age, indeed. Men were too willing to follow Christ. There is a religion of sentiment based on selfishness; and there is nothing that works more powerfully than that. There is an undertone of selfishness that gives force to the feeble impulse of sentimentality, and that leads a man, if he is moral and good-natured, and is a regular attendant at a respectable church, and pursues a moderate and

even

course through life, to think that he is a Christian.

Then there was about Christ, undoubtedly, a personal attraction; and for a time it was the fashion to go after Him. Those that were round about Him heard, moreover, discourses that were very ingenious. His philosophy was full of windows-for illustrations are windows-that let in the light of knowledge upon the more abstract truths of life. So by reason of all these things together they followed Christ, not because it made them better, but because it made them feel better for the time. Under such circumstances thousands and thou

sands of persons are paralleling the experience of Christ in His own time. Multitudes of men followed Him. Sometimes they followed Him because He healed the sick, and because His mercy might be extended to them or to their households. He fed the hungry. They never forgot that.

Exaltation of character and conduct by the direct and efficacious interference of the Spirit of God upon the human heart was Christ's constant teaching. "I came to rebuild men, and there is power to rebuild them. I came to give predominance to that in man which is rational and spiritual, over that which is carnal and fleshly" -that was His constant idea. "You must be born into the upper kingdom. You must be born out of the lower and animal nature into the higher and spiritual nature."

Now see, with that in view, what an intensity there was in the ministry of Christ in that direction. Although He did not disdain the civilities of society, although He looked with sympathy upon all the relations of man to man, yet when His ministry was brought to bear upon this one great topic-how the human soul should be transformed from a low, selfish condition, into a high, spiritual, generous, loving or divine condition-then there was the utmost intensity in His teaching. "Ye must be born again," He said to one of the best men in Judæa.

The idea He had in mind, and pressed upon men, was one that could not be carried out except by putting forth the energy of man's nature. If in attempting to carry it out you are resisted, there is no resistance which shall for one single moment furnish ground for excuse. "If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee;" it is in the spirit of this, and as a climax to it, that He says,

"If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple."

Does religion, then, develop hatred? Is it the very first step of that great law to hate those who are nearest to us? If religion requires hatred, if we are to hate, ought not our hating to be of those who are farthest away from us? If it were said, "Hate the Chinaman, hate the African, hate Nihilists, hate folks away off," we should not think so much of it; but the idea that we are to hate our father and our mother, whom we are commanded to honour, strikes us as strange. Is religion something that no man can have until he has thrown up all his affections? And does religion set men against pleasure and occupation? This is the interpretation which a great many have given to the text. Not a few of them have been very good men, and some of them have been among the most heroic. There have been men who have given up father and mother and household, and given themselves to celibacy, and driven themselves out from the circle of connections, and gone into caves, or into convents, which are only very respectable caves, and undertaken to forsake all occupations, and clothed themselves in sack-cloth, and flagellated themselves, and by all physical pain endeavoured to extinguish the flame of the great natural affections. There is to-day underground in Rome a convent of the dead, as it is called, in which there are persons who have gone out from life, and out from under the shining of the sun, who are under vows and covenants not again to see the face of man or the light of love, and who are to live there like mummies, in fulfilment of what they feel to be

the conditions of eternal life.

Now, this is not to be laughed at, though it may be wept over. But Christ's religion simply demands that a man should put the love and authority of God over the soul first and above all other things. When that is once established so that it controls everything, and is the mainspring of life; when it becomes the centre of the republic of the soul in such a way as that every part of it obeys this grand regnant feeling, love to God and love to man, there is nothing in the whole of human life that is not lawful to us.

How, then, about hating father and mother, and brother and sister, and one's whole life? Well, I will tell you. When the cannon opened on Fort Sumter and the flag of the nation went down, there was an underlying love of country, which no man ever dreamed was so strong in the national mind; and that cannon-shot roused up this deep feeling, and men felt called to give themselves to their country. To do that it was necessary for many a lawyer to throw away his briefs, for many a merchant to shut up his books, for many a mechanic to drop his tools, for many a farmer to leave his plow in the furrow, for many a husband to say farewell to his wife, and for many a father to kiss for the last time his child's rosy lips. All that was dear to men's lives was on the one side saying to them, "Do not put yourself in peril," and on the other side was this call of their country; and as compared with this, neither wife, nor child, nor neighbour, nor honour, nor peace, nor wealth, had any power over them. In the enthusiasm of that critical period men sought to cast themselves, living sac rifices, into the breach.

Is it said, when this overmastering impulse was opposed by men's lower