LITERATURE. Aglionby (F. K.), The Better Choice, 157. Buckland (A. R.), Text-Studies for a Year, 115. Gurney (T. A.), The Living Lord and the Opened Grave, 57. Howatt (J. R.), The Children's Pew, 71. Jerdan (C.), Manna for Young Pilgrims, 272. Keble (J.), Sermons for the Christian Year; Easter to Ascension, 147. Newbolt (W. C. E.), Words of Exhortation, 147. Pentecost (G. F.), Bible Studies: Mark and Jewish History, 193. Pierson (A. T.), The Making of a Sermon, 96. Russell (A.), The Light that Lighteth Every Man, 107. Shore (T. T.), Saint George for England, 104. Simpson (W.), in The World's Great Sermons, v. 121. Smyth (N.), The Reality of Faith, 244. Steel (T. H.), Sermons in Harrow Chapel, 171. Thorne (H.), Foreshadowings of the Gospel, 205. Varley (H.), Some Main Questions of the Christian Faith, 78. Wheeler (W. C.), Sermons and Addresses, 162. Whiton (J. M.), Beyond the Shadow, 68, 224. Wilson (S.), Lenten Shadows and Easter Lights, 125. Christian World Pulpit, v. 369 (Kennedy); viii. 347 (Brown); xvi. 197 (Craig); xxiii. 276 (Alexander); xli. 355 (Varley); xlvii. 257 (Newbolt). Churchman's Pulpit: Easter Day and Season: vii. 200 (Keble), 203 (Vaughan). First Sunday after Easter; vii. 463 (Cobb). THE RESURRECTION FROM THE DEAD. But now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of them that are asleep.-1 Cor. xv. 20. 1. Do we recognize the immense debt which we owe to the great Apostle of the Gentiles? We base our hopes for time and eternity on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Well, it was St. Paul who was the first to pierce beneath their surface and seize their hidden meaning and power. The Twelve, in their early preaching days, were staggered by the death, and only half understood the resurrection. They had to sit at St. Paul's feet before their Messianic hopes broadened out into the eternal Gospel. 2. The Apostle has been contemplating the long train of dismal consequences which he sees would arise if we had only a dead Christ. He thinks that he, the Apostle, would have nothing to preach, and we nothing to believe. He thinks that all hope of deliverance from sin would fade away. He thinks that, the one fact which gives assurance of immortality having vanished, the dead who had nurtured the assurance have perished. And he thinks that if things were so, then Christian men, who had believed a false gospel, and nourished an empty faith, and died clinging to a baseless hope, were far more to be pitied than men who had had less splendid dreams and less utter illusions. Then, with a swift revulsion of feeling, he turns away from that dreary picture, and with a change of key, which the dullest ear can appreciate, from the wailing minors of the preceding verses, he breaks into this burst of triumph. "Now"-things being as they are, for it is the logical "now,” and not the temporal one-Christ is risen from the dead, and that as the first-fruits of them that slept. 3. What a shout of joy there is in that word "now" with which the Apostle opens out into his glorious theme of the Resurrection. It has been struggling to get out, through discords and obscuring passages of controversial doubt. This great theme of the Apostolic Gospel had been dragged down by the cries of those who say there is no resurrection of the dead; down deeper into the sombre depths of a false witness to God, of a tragic mistake in estimating evidence; down into a gloom, where the holy dead lie only as so many perished lives, crushed by sin, and a challenge to despair. We hardly trace a note of the first inspiration in the dismal discord of broken hopes and fooled expectations: "If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable." But it is at this point that the resurrection theme bursts out, rising above and upon the shifting discords, and opening up out of the passages which ended only in woe. "Now hath Christ been raised from the dead, the first-fruits of them that are asleep." Christian preaching was not a proclamation of meaningless and empty platitudes, not a principle incapable of producing any good results; God's messengers were not false witnesses; the Christian dead were not perished; Christian life was not a hollow sham, a cunningly devised fable. All was safe all was bright; the brighter because the very discordance of the doubt could only open out into this: Christ was risen, His people should also rise. The subject is the Resurrection of Christ as the pledge of our Resurrection. Take it in three parts I. The Possibility of the Resurrection. II. The Power of the Resurrection. III. The Promise of the Resurrection. I. THE POSSIBILITY OF THE RESURRECTION. 1. The Christian doctrine of the Resurrection is a stumblingblock to faith because we have allowed ourselves to exalt and to exaggerate death to a degree altogether beyond reason and Scripture. We speak, that is to say, and mourn, as though death were the last law of life, as though death were the ultimate fact of our experience, and then we have to smuggle in our hope of the resurrection as a miraculous exception to this universal power of death. Exactly the opposite is true. Life is the law of nature, and death a natural means to more life and better. Death is the lower fact, and life the higher. Or more specifically, the resurrection of Jesus is not the great exception to natural law; it is an exemplification of the higher, universal law of life. The earth was dead, so they tell us, ages ago. But now how this earth lives! There is hardly a cliff too barren for nature not to hang some blooming thing upon it; and the old earth teems with life. Furthermore, even here, where death reigns, life has been growing higher, more complex, more capable of larger correspondences with things. Between the lowest living thing and the brain of man there is a difference of life wide as the distance between the earth and the heavens. That first infinitesimal point of life has no world with which to establish relations larger than the microscopic field in which we have looked and discovered it, but we have already established relations of thought and knowledge with the farthest stars. Plainly then, without any doubt, life is something stronger thus far upon this earth than death. Notwithstanding death, life grows to be more and richer. What is death, so far as we can see what it is? Here is a minute living thing in a glass of water. You turn the water out. That living particle is now mere dust upon the glass. Dead,that is, it is no longer moving in an element corresponding to its capacity of vital movements. What is death then? A living thing is no longer in harmony with its surroundings. It is thrown out of its own proper correspondence with things; it is dead. So death is a relative thing. It is simply some wrong or imperfect adjustment of life to external conditions. But death may be partial, then, not entire. A part of the body may be dead. A man may be dead in some relations, and still live in others. There is a sense in which we die daily. Parts of us are thrown out of vital relations. The body may begin to die long before it is dead. Death is but a relative, negative thing. Life is the principle, the force, the law; death the limitation, the accident, the partial negation of God's great affirmation of life in things. |