^ The song of the angels, the voice at the baptism, the agony in the garden, the sublime anguish of Calvary, would have been inexplicable without the light which was reflected back upon them by the angels at the open tomb on the morning of the resurrec- tion. Such a nature aud such a life were not formed and fashioned within the narrow limits of time and space ; they brought infinity and immortality within the confines of the world. Alone among men, Christ has visibly put on immortality; but that sublime truth does not rest on the resurrection ; it rests on the very structure of man's nature and life. Neither is comprehensible without it; neither is ever complete in itself; both aftirm its reality and predict its fuller disclosure. The risen Christ does not stand solitary in a vast circle of unopened graves ; He is the visible witness to the sublime truth that the grave has no victory and death no sting; for life and immortality are one and the same.^
Oh, had I lived in that great day,
How had its glory new Fill'd earth and heaven, and caught away My ravish'd spirit too !
No thoughts that to the world belong
Had stood against the wave Of love which set so deep and strong From Christ's then open grave. 1 H. W. Mabie, The Life of the Spirit, 360. PS. XXV.-CXIX. — 26
402 THE DAY WHICH THE LORD MADE
No cloister-floor of humid stone Had been too cold for me;
For me no Eastern desert lone Had been too far to flee>
I.
A Day of Victory.
The joy of Easter is inspired by the hope which the day of our Lord's resurrection warrants and quickens. What is this hope, and how does it spring from our Saviour's rising again from the dead? The great hope which the resurrection sets before us is the completeness of our life after death.
1. The difficulty of believing in a future life is due, not to the reason, but to the imagination as controlled by the senses. Who of us has not made this discovery, in some one of those dark hours which sooner or later visit every human life ? Who of us has not stood by the open coffin, and felt himself, or marked how others feel, the terrific empire of sense in the presence of death ? The form which was once full of life, quivering with expressive- ness, with thought, with feeling, now lies before us cold and motionless, like a plaster cast of its former self. Perhaps the traces of what must follow are already discernible ; and forthwith the imagination surrenders itself, like a docile pupil, to the guidance of the senses, and ends by proclaiming the victory of death ; a victory too clear, too complete, too unquestionable, to allow reason or revelation to raise their voices in favour of any sort of life that can possibly survive it.
2. Now it was to deal with this specific difficulty that our Lord willed to die, and then, by a literal bodily resurrection, to rise from the grave. He would grapple with the imperious urgency of the senses and the imagination on their own ground. He would beat down by an act, palpable to the senses, and attested by evidence which should warrant its reality for all time, the tyrant power which sought to shut out from man the hope of an
' Matthew Arnold, Elegiac Poems.
PSALM cxviii. 24 403
immortal life. When the disciples saw that the Eisen Being before them was their Lord ; when they noted His pierced hands, His feet, His side ; when they conversed with Him, ate with Him, listened to Him, followed Him much as of old ; then they knew that the Master who had been killed upon the cross by a pro- tracted agony, and committed to the grave as a bleeding and mangled corpse, had really risen from death, and had opened a new era of hope for the human race. And for us, in a distant age, this fact that Christ rose from death is not less full of precious hope and joy than for our first forefathers in the faith. For the early Christians the resurrection was practically Christi- anity, nay, the whole of Christianity, in so far as Christianity as a whole rested on it as the proof-fact of its having come from heaven. This is what the first Christians felt: of the truth of their faith " God had given an assurance unto all men, in that he had raised Jesus from the dead." Therefore did the resurrection inspire them with such fervent joy.
^ If it belong to man to rejoice when some great General has fought his country's enemies, and beaten them and led their chiefs captives ; if on such occasions our bells ring, and our cities are decked with garlands, and flags wave, and there are feastings and banquetings.
And the tumult of their acclaim is rolled
Through the open gates of the city afar,
To the shepherd who watcheth the evening star,
if a nation joys in the return of the triumphant General, and hearts are warmed all through the length and breadth of the land at the news, as by electric sympathy, and all agree to make holiday, because now the yoke of the invader has been broken, and they feel themselves free — and hearth, and home, and wife, and child, and all that they hold dear is rescued out of peril, and the possession secured to them — how much more surely ought the Christian to be glad and rejoice on each recurrence of Easter ? For it is the anniversary of the Lord's Victory. He comes to us as the Captain of our Salvation, comes amongst us fresh from combat, " with dyed garments from Bozrah," " treading in the greatness of his strength " ; He comes, leading the Invader a prisoner, leading captivity captive.^