1 E. W. Corbet, Letters from a Mystic of the Present Day, 183.
468 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
consistently unjust person, may always be rightly distinguished at a glance ; and if the qualities are continued by descent through a generation or two, there arises a complete distinction of race. Both moral and physical qualities are communicated by descent, far more than they can be developed by education (though both may be destroyed by want of education) ; and there is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of person and mind which the human creature may attain, by persevering observance of the laws of God respecting its birth and training.1
IF In 1865 Lord Francis Douglas, while climbing Mont Blanc, slipped and fell to his death. His body could not be found, and it was supposed that it had fallen into the bed of the glacier. Accord- ing to computations based on careful estimates from experience, the glacier should have discharged the body at the foot of the mountain in the summer of 1905. All that summer, the aged mother of Lord Francis was there watching and waiting for the body of her boy, but the body, to her bitter disappointment, did not appear. Broken-hearted, she had been waiting for years just to get a glimpse of the scarred face and mangled body she loved, and to lay its dust to rest. She would have been comforted if only that had been allowed her. But there is an infinitely better thing which Christ has prepared ; not the dull dust and broken body released from the icy embrace of the cruel glacier, but the living, glorified personality in the bosom of the Father's love; not for one hurried, agonizing glimpse as the heart sobs over the memory of what it has lost ; but for ever and ever in the fellow- ship of heaven.2
2. What are the consequences of Christ's Eesurrection ?
(1) It gives us a complete Gospel. — A dead Christ annihilates the Gospel. "If Christ be not risen," says the Apostle, "our preaching," by which he means not the act but the substance of his preaching, " is vain M ; or, as the word might be more ac- curately rendered, " empty." There is nothing in it ; no contents. It is a blown bladder; nothing in it but wind. What was St. Paul's " preaching " ? It all turned upon these points — that Jesus Christ was the Son of God ; that He was Incarnate in the flesh of us men ; that He died on the Cross for our offences ; that He was raised again, and had ascended into Heaven, ruling the world and breathing His presence into believing hearts ; and that He would come again to be our Judge. These were the elements
1 Raskin, Munera Pulvcrls ( Works, xvii. 149). 3 J. I. Vance, Tendency, 245.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 469
of what St. Paul called " his gospel." He faces the supposition of a dead Christ, and he says, " It is all gone ! It is all vanished into thin air. I have nothing to preach if I have not a Cross to preach which is man's deliverance from sin, because on it the Son of God hath died, and I know that Jesus Christ's sacrifice is accepted and sufficient, only because I have it attested to me in His rising again from the dead."
(2) A living Christ gives faith something to lay hold of. — The Apostle here in the context twice says, according to the Authorized Version, that a dead Christ makes our faith " vain." But he really used two different words, the former of which is applied to " preaching," and means literally " empty," while the latter means " of none effect " or " powerless." So there are two ideas suggested here. The risen Christ puts some contents, so to speak, into our faith. Who can trust a dead Christ, or who can trust a human Christ ? That would be as much a blasphemy as trusting any other man. It is only when we recognize Him as declared to be the Son of God, and that by the resurrection from the dead, that our faith has anything round which it can twine, and to which it can cleave. That living Saviour will stretch out His hand to us if we look to Him, and if I put my poor, trembling little hand up towards Him, He will bend to me and clasp it. You cannot exercise faith unless you have a risen Saviour, and unless you exercise faith in Him your lives are marred and sad.
(3) Again, a living Christ destroys the dominion of sin. — The first blessing which the believing soul receives through and from a risen Christ is deliverance from sin. If He whom we believed to be our sacrifice by His death and our sanctification by His life has not risen, then all which makes His death other than a martyr's vanishes, and with it vanish forgiveness and purifying. Only when we recognize that in His Cross, explained by His resurrection, we have redemption through His blood, even the forgiveness of sins, and by the communication of the risen life from the risen Lord possess that new nature which sets us free from the dominion of our evil — only then is faith operative in setting us free from our sins.