Better sleep you so will get,
And at morning wake more gay — Saith the children's mother.
You I must unclothe again,
For you need a better dress; Too much worn are body and brain ;
You need everlastingness — Saith the heavenly father.
I went down death's lonely stair;
Laid my garments in the tomb ; Dressed again one morning fair;
Hastened up, and hied me home — Saith the elder brother.
i CORINTHIANS xv. 20 479
Then I will not be afraid
Any ill can come to me; When 'tis time to go to bed,
I will rise and go with thee — Saith the little brother.1
3. The resurrection of Christ is the pattern of our resurrection. — The first sheaf is a specimen, type, example, or pattern of the harvest at hand. If the first fruits be poor and withered, the after fruits will be similar ; if rich, full, and perfect, the harvest expected will be excellent. When we read that the Lord shall raise our vile bodies at the last, so that they may be fashioned like His own body of glory, we have at once a type of the glorified humanity that shall stand on the earth at the last day. He remained with us for forty days after He had risen, in order to give us light concerning the wonderful transformation.
(1) The condition of the spirit after death and resurrection is clearly seen in that light. Full and perfect peace was the atmosphere in which the spirit of the great Eedeemer lived and moved after He had conquered death and the grave. The memory that He had of the past was clear and distinct, but not painful in the smallest degree ; He contemplated the whole of His life in the past as a finished work, an arduous task accomplished, a hard-won battle ended — the whole to look back upon as a joy for evermore. His heart was the same, as kind and thoughtful as ever, and He resumed companionship with His friends very much as if there had been no cross and no grave. We hope to be like Him in all that pertained to His holy and happy humanity ; our spirits hushed to rest, and blest in the possession of His peace ; our minds unvexed and untortured by the element of pain that troubles our memories here, and poisons our joy when we recall the past. We look to have, like Him, the same sweet intercourse with former friends of mortal years, and to retain our old familiar, and well-known personality, set free from sin.
(2) The condition of the glorified body is unveiled in the light of His forty days' sojourn after the resurrection. His was most distinctly a real body, and not a phantom without substance, to mock the gazer's sight. So real was He to the disciples that, after the first natural start of terror, they fell easily into their
1 George MacDonald, Poetical TForks, i. 348.
480 RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD
old ways with Him, and did not seem to feel it a strange thing to walk and talk with One in a glorified state. He was easily recognized by them, for His body had the well-known marks and signs by which they were able to identify Him at once. He showed them His hands and His feet —
The arm which held the children, the pale hand That gently touched the eyelids of the blind And opened passive to the cruel nail.
They could not fail to remember every line of His blessed face ; He had been away only for a little while, and it was easy to know Him after the short grief and pain. The body of the Lord was essentially a spiritual one withal; not any longer confined to the conditions of time, space, and matter, but supreme in power over the world of sense ; able to enter a fast-closed room, and to leave it at will; to become visible or invisible as He wished, known or unknown — His was a body that obeyed every wish of the Spirit.
If I sent the Queen (January 1885) a little book which con- tained some verses due to a great sorrow of my own. In her reply she said, " You surely do not think, as it would a little seem from the beautiful poem, My Yew Tree, that our dear ones sleep awhile, and that their bodies are to rise again ? I thought you wrote to me once you thought, as I always think one feels one must, that the spirit is at once free in death, and that you were inclined to believe in a spiritual body within our present one ? "
To this I replied that the Queen was quite right in supposing that I was in sympathy with the view that the " spiritual body " (as St. Paul calls it) is set free at death. I have never been able to feel that the supposed long sleep and time of unconscious- ness is taught us in the New Testament. The phrases I had used in my verses were used in the sense that to us our dear ones seemed to sleep ; and that what I had tried tc sing was a kind of triumph song, telling the cold earth that her seeming victory was no victory at all.1