Distrust of the supernatural, insistence on the present and the practical, and the pride of a self-styled common sense, have done much to rob modern Christianity of this vast horizon, to blind it to this heavenly vision. But wherever the life of Jesus is being manifested in mortal flesh--wherever in His service and for His sake men and women die daily, wearing out nature, but with spirit ceaselessly renewed--there the unseen becomes real again. Such people know that what they do is not for one dead, but for One who lives; they know that the daily inspirations they receive, the hopes, the deliverances, are wrought in them, not by themselves, but by One who has all power in heaven and on earth. The things that are unseen and eternal stand out as what they are in relation to lives like these; to other lives, they have no relation at all. A worldly and selfish career does not work out an exceeding and eternal weight of glory, and therefore to the worldly and selfish man heaven is for ever an unpractical, incredible thing. But it not only comes out in its brightness, it comes out as a mighty inspiration and support, to every one who bears about in his body the dying of Jesus; as he fastens his eye upon it, he takes heart anew, and in spite of daily dying "faints not."
[40] Σὺν Ἰησοῦ is the true reading: sameness of kind is meant, not of time.
[41] Διὰ τῶν πλειόνων is construed in the R.V. with πλεονάσασα (so Meyer): De Wette takes it as above; in the A.V. the διὰ is made to govern τὴν εὐχαριστίαν. There is no grammatical decision certain here.
[42] The Hebrew Psalm cxvi. 10 is at this precise point practically unintelligible, but that does not justify any one in saying that the fine thought of the Apostle is utterly foreign to the original text. The open confession of God, as a duty of faith, pervades the psalm from this point to the end (the verses beginning Ἐπίστευσα διὸ ἐλάλησα make a psalm by themselves in the LXX.).