* J. Orr, The Sesurrection of Jesus, 271.
2 TIMOTHY I. lo 179
is the shuffling off of the mortal coil of flesh that the life within may have room to expand and may receive from God a "spiritual body" which may be a fit organ for the renewed spirit.
•[j Grant that a precious memory may be longer and deeper and stronger than time, still when I think what that furious persecutor of Christ and that weak repudiator of his Master became in the course of their Christian experience, — and they are types of innumerable transformations of character since, — I feel sure that the change was not wrought in them by the power of the sacred memory of a dear, dead friend, — Paul had no such memory of Jesus, — but by their close touch and communion with the quickening spirit of a risen and living Lord. Pressing nearer, coming closer to Him, opening our inmost selves to His sweet influence, suffering Him to make His own impression upon us, who can say what He might work in us and make of us ? What newness of life ? What hope of glory ?
Long time ago and far away,
One Easter morn at break of day,
Friar Francisco, strolling round
The monastery garden, found
Among the rose leaves at his feet
A clod of earth surpassing sweet.
Amazed to find a common bit
Of sod so sweet, he questioned it:
"Whence, then, or how hast thou," he cried,
Such fragrance?" and the clod replied:
" I was a piece of common clay
Until God willed that where I lay
A lovely rose should bud and bloom.
I breathed and drank in its perfuma
If any fragrance I disclose
It is the sweetness of His rose."
Francisco meekly bowed his head
And mused awhile : then knelt and said :
" 0 Thou whose love embraces all
Thy works and creatures, great and small,
I am the clod ! the Rose is He
Who loved and gave Himself for me.
By that immortal Flower of Thine
Breathe on this barren soul of mine;
Bestow its fragrance upon me,
The fragrance of its purity."
i8o LIFE AND IMMORTALITY
Then, as responsive to his prayer, Came, wafted on the morning air, The music of the minster bell, Of joyous choirs and organ's swell Francisco raised in glad surprise, His radiant face and streaming eyes ; Kose from his knees and went his way, The gladdest of glad souls that day, — Eisen with Christ ! as he would say.
3. Last of all notice three great gains that come to us through faith in Him who brought life and incorruption to light.
(1) We obtain deliverance from the fear of death. — To all of us death has its aspect of terror. May we not say that to many of us it has its attitude of intense repulsion ? We shrink from dying, and eveu if we do not our hearts fail us in the thought of what lies beyond. But our acquaintance with death, as we have stood at the death-bed of some of our dear ones, makes us shrink from dying. We sometimes feel that if the drawing of that last breath were with us, as with Christ, a willing act, we should never dare to draw that last breath, it is so awful. But with many there is not only this shrinking from dying, but also a shrinking from what lies beyond.
Now see what Christ has done for us. He has destroyed death and destroyed him who has the power of death. What does this mean ? The word in the original does not mean that Christ has made death not to be. That is not true. What it means is this, that Christ has so dealt with death that He has taken out of it all its sting, all its power ; men are not influenced by it as they were of old. They look upon it with new eyes; they see death transformed.
(2) We rise above the stoical or agnostic indifference to death. — The preacher of a secular ethic asserts that death is a part of the natural order and ought to be faced with fortitude. And some- times a man, not in anywise imbruted by sin, meets it without a misgiving, and at the same time confesses no obligation to Jesus the Kedeemer. We wonder at the calmness and good-humour with which Socrates drank his cup of hemlock and at the high mettle with which some men, not distinctly religious in spirit, face the end of life. We are amazed at the impassivity with
2 TIMOTHY I. lo i8i
which tens of thousands of Japanese throw away their lives in an outburst of loyalty and patriotism. Perhaps the courage of the man who is without a formulated Christian faith may be inspired by a vague sense of the benignity of the cosmic order. But sin puts a new aspect upon death and invests it with a portentous fatality in human fortunes. If unfallen man had been destined to pass through changes corresponding to physical death, his normal consciousness of God might have made such a crisis into a translation. A vague sense of sin bred the gloom and shrouding, terror-haunted shadows of the Babylonian underworld, and sin arms death with a noxious sting wherever a soul becomes burdened by a sense of demerit and transgression. Man might have died without any sign of trepidation or foreboding if his animal sleep had continued unbroken. When rational beings find out how far they have gone in a downward path, the terror of death starts up within them, and is in no sense a creation of theology. The heir of immortality trembles at the thought of his inalienable heritage. But in redeeming us Jesus took away the power of death. The cross declared the truth of man's immor- tality ; for if man had been one with the grass of the field Jesus would not have set Himself, at such a cost, to remove a blight on the bloom of the hour. His holy Passion inscribed a new value on human life. By destroying sin He changed a dark, soul- withering, wrathful underworld into a realm filled with peace, forgiveness, goodwill, and the fruits of righteousness.