suppress one syllable of its language, nor to tone down one tint of its meaning.

'You must not seem to tell about anything that was out of the course of nature.' What is the course of nature? Many things in the tropics are out of the course of nature at the poles; many things done by a great Minister in the Cabinet, are out of the course of nature as known to a child in the cradle; many things, if predicted in the infancy of science-a message by wire, for instance-would have been voted out of the course of nature; when an oak says, 'I am an acorn;' when a block, solid as a stone, and cold as death, says, 'I am water;' when the stately Vizier says, 'I am Joseph,' to those who knew Joseph as the little lad who shook at the sound of their voices;-all these things would seem out of the course of nature, until nature is understood.

So also is the resurrection of the dead. What do we really know about it? When I try to think my way into the circle to which it belongs, I am in a kingdom of mystery; all is blank to me; I can only feel about in the dark, find not ground to stand on, no line to touch; there is not in this domain one single condition that I know; in no single hint can I find a key to the enigmas of this eternity; and here, it is impossible for me to say what may, or may not be. I do not know what formative force

often in bondage to

inherently belongs to that mystic life which we call the soul; but which Paul, in his argument on the resurrection, seems to call a seed. I do not know how, by the will of God, through the working of that force within it, and in accordance with its own nature, it may draw charmed atoms round it, so as to verify the apostle's words, 'To every seed his own body.' I know that in this system of life, the spirit is the body; but I do not know how far in the next the body may be under the mastery of the spirit; nor do I know what powers it may have of contraction or expansion, visibility or invisibility; how it may become rarefied into inconceivable refinement, and then have that which, if present to us now, might be reported by our senses as 'flesh and bones.' Do not say this is nonsense: you have no proof that it is so; no standard whatever by which to regulate your physical theories of another life. You say, 'do not dogmatise!' I insist on this-that you do not. As summer is a mystery to winter, so is heaven. to earth; and we depend for our knowledge of it, not on philosophy, but on revelation.

Jesus came to His own company when gathered round the evening lamp, all in a commotion with stories of the day. Secretly, silently, suddenly, unaccountably He came, casting no shadow, striking no sound, making no bolt stir in its socket, no latch lift in its hasp,

no foot with an echo fall upon a stone-so they seem to have thought. It is a spirit!' cried they. However, it was not a spirit, but a body that they saw.

It was not merely an ordinary body, liable to ordinary laws; still, it was a body,-a body, perhaps, like that in which, at the dawn of time, the Saviour had walked with Adam in Paradise, wrestled with Jacob in the hour of mystic intensity, or reclined under the green arches of the oak at Mamre; but it was a body. No stone wall could shut it in; no iron bar could keep it out; no law of gravitation could detain it; but it was a body. A body which had been dead, but which was alive again; and no grave could hold it. Sown in weakness, it had been raised in power; sown a natural body, raised a spiritual body; for all that, it was a body.

It was flesh; all flesh is not the same flesh but there is one kind of flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, another of birds. There are also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial; but the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another. There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differeth from another star in glory.' This glory was the glory of the celestial; visible to mortals only by the light of miracle, and by an act of Divine prerogative.

As Moses, coming down from Sinai, with face of celestial flame, 'put a vail over his face,' that the children of Israel might converse with him, so did the awful King of Moses shade and vail His glories so that the disciples might speak to Him and live. To show them that it was a true body, He even condescended to take food in their presence. The capacity to assimilate food is a distinct thing from the necessity; and He took this, not that He might support life, but that He might convince them, and all in every age whom they represented, that He was no mere phantom.1

To show them not only that it was a true material organism, but the very body that had been crucified, He showed the ghastly gashes made in the crucifixion. Luke says, 'He showed them His hands and His feet:' those hands and feet that had always been about His Father's business; hands that had waved away the powers of darkness; hands that had been placed on the head of little children; hands that had broken the bread of miracle; feet that had walked the stormy waters; feet that had carried Him to the weeping sisters, and the tomb of Lazarus; feet that had climbed the mountain stair into the midnight holy of holies, where He prayed; feet that had hastened to the side

Luke xxiv. 43.

of the wretched, had stood near the most forlorn; feet that took Him down to Gethsemane, and failed Him there under the load of our sorrow; feet that with weak, fainting, yet resolute steps, came out of Jerusalem, while the hands assayed to hold upon His shoulder the cruel cross-the hands and the feet that were nailed to that cross.1

Thus did He establish, by the most splendid evidence, that fact of His resurrection on which the entire supernaturalism of our religion is decided, and on which all the work of the Atonement depends; while doing this, He most emphatically and pathetically called their attention to the Atonement itself. Those deathmarks in what was now alive, while they settled His identity, proclaimed His sacrifice; another day, in calmer moments, and with richer spiritual capacity, they will see it all. They will remember the print of the nails, and find in them deeper significance than they saw at the time; hot and cold at the rush of recollections, they will say, We understand it all now; fools that we were and slow of heart to believe, we ought, at the time, to have beheld in Him 'the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world!' He carried with Him these memorials of sacrifice into the central splendours of the

1 Luke xxiv. 40.