brecho cheapchic

      Make clear the fact of the resurrection of Christ, it will be a fact that chimes with humanity's unutterable longings, and fits in as the key stone of the radiant arch of its hopes. Make clear that fact, and then, as the meridian sun brings out in all their boldness the mountains, and in all their beauty, the swarded valleys faintly described in the dim twilight, so will a risen Son of righteousness bring out these hints, and truths, and ideas, in controlling power over the intellect, and influence over the practical life. Make clear the fact, and one simple-minded Christian believer, full of resurrection power, shall chase a thousand carping rationalists, and two shall put ten thousand to flight. Our faith in God, asks of God--a risen Redeemer.

      St. Paul claims, if Christ be not risen, faith in Him is vain. So interwoven with the very life, and teachings, and death of Christ was the truth of His resurrection, that to deny the latter would be to destroy, root and branch, all faith in Him as Teacher and Savior. He had said, "Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it again." After the surpassing glory of the transfiguration, he had commanded, "Tell the vision to no man until the Son of man be risen from the dead."

      He must either have been unconsciously deceived and then he would have shown himself a weak, erring man, and no longer entitled to the claim of a teacher sent from God; or he must have been a willful impostor, and thus have sunk in the mire trodden beneath the feet of indignant, deluded men. If Christ be not risen, your faith is vain; your faith in Him as a Savior is vain. Your Christian consciousness is a nullity, and a lie. There has been no atonement. Ye are yet in your sins. Life, death, resurrection, all enter into the redeeming work of Christ. He was "delivered for our offenses, and raised again for our justification." "If thou shalt confess with thy mouth, the Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that God raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved." No resurrection, no salvation.

      He asserts of the apostles: "We are found false witnesses." We, who were fully competent by reason of our numbers, to be believed, for there were the eleven apostles, the two Marys, Cleopas, the most of the seventy, and five hundred others beside. Nearly all were living, and ready to testify. Fully competent, from the opportunities we have enjoyed of knowing the facts to which we bear witness. We have been with the Savior; we have known him intimately; we have treasured up His words. His image is stamped upon our hearts; we beheld His miracles; we knew he was crucified; we went to the tomb, expecting to find the body there; we saw Him alive again; we saw His pierced hands and wounded side; we heard the familiar voice; we received our high commission; we saw Him ascend into glory.

      We have gained nothing, from an earthly standpoint, but loss of home, of friends, of reputation. We are made the filth and offscouring of the world. We are made a spectacle unto angels and to men. Stripes, bonds, imprisonment are before us. The headsman's axe glitters in the sun. "To the lions, to the lions!" rings in our ears. Covered with pitch, and set on fire, we shall light the streets of Rome by midnight! If in this life only, we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.

      How the apostle, with jubilant utterance, turns away from the loathsome impossibility he has presented.

      "Now is Christ risen form the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept." The irrefutable fact stands forth in all its glorious majesty and infinite sweep of meaning.

      The Gospel records must be torn to tatters, and scattered with the rent sybilline leaves, never more to be gathered. The whole colossal fabric of Christianity must have been built upon an abyss. The head and founder of the Church must have been created by the Church. A man must have been the father of his own ancestors, before this fact can be successfully denied.

      Christ is risen from the dead. His own words have been justified. Christ is risen from the dead, and God has given the seal and sign manual to his Messianic mission. He has declared Him to be the Son of God, with power. Christ is risen from the dead, and an unsetting sun--the new and unfailing center of attraction--has burst forth in glory from the darkness of the tomb. Christ is risen, and we, too, shall rise. Every charnel house is robbed of its terrors. The sting has been plucked from death, and the grave been robbed of its victory. The darkness has forever passed. It is morning.

      In that beautiful city of the dead, Greenwood cemetery, where the precious dust of so many loved ones reposes--that city, on its eminence, graced with flowers, fit resurrection--emblems of life and loveliness springing from decay, and melodious with the music of birds--that city, overlooking the city of the living below it, and the river and the sea beyond it, contains here and there a broken pedestal, which speaks of plans unrealized, and expectations unfulfilled; of aspirations unsatisfied, and ends unachieved. But on some of them is a hand pointing upward. A risen Christ is the inspiration of the thought. The upward pointing is the mute and eloquent suggestion, that on the plains of the New Jerusalem, the column of life shall be erected.

      A limited sphere here, a boundless amphitheatre there. Seeming failure here, assured success there. Dead hopes here, living realizations there. Bafflings, disappointments here; unimpeded progress there. Home there, rewards there, friends there, Jesus there. Can we doubt the life beyond? "Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain, in the Lord." --by Rt. Rev. Samuel Fallows, D. D.

     "Christ is risen." How these words change the whole aspect of human life! Nothing short of this could be our proof and pledge that we also shall rise. We are not left to dim intimations or vague hopes, or faint analogies, but we have a permanent and a firm conviction, a sure and certain hope. Look into the the Savior's empty tomb. "He is not here: He is risen, as He said." They that sleep in all those narrow graves shall wake again, shall rise again. Weep not widowed wife, father, orphan boy, Thy dead shall live. They shall come forth from the power of death and Hades. What a mighty victory! What a giant sporting! What a trampling of the last enemy beneath the feet! What a hope, what a change in the thought of life! Bravely and happily let us walk through the dark valley, for out of it is a door of immortality that opens on the gardens of heaven and the streams of life, where the whole soul is flooded by the sense of a newer and grander being, and our tears wiped away by God's own hand. This is the Christian's hope truly, and herein Christ makes us more than conquerors, for we not only triumph over the enemy, but profit by him, wringing out of his curse a blessing, out of his prison a coronation and a home. "It is sown in corruption, it is raised in incorruption." Let us live in love, in humility, in Christ and for Christ. This will make us noble and happy in life, this will strengthen us to smile at death, this will cause us to live all our days in the continual light of these two most marvelous of all Christian truths: the resurrection of the body, and the immortality of the soul.-- by Canon F. W. Farrar, D. D.

      "Whether buried in the earth, or floating in the sea, or consumed by the flames, or enriching the battle-field, or evaporated in the atmosphere,--all, from Adam to the latest-born, shall wend their way to the great arena of the judgement. Every perished bone and every secret particle of dust shall obey the summons and come forth. If one could then look upon the earth, he would see it as one mighty excavated globe, and wonder how such countless generations could have found a dwelling beneath its surface."-- by Rev. Gardner Spring D. D.

      We are strangers in the universe of God. Confined to that spot on which we dwell, we are permitted to know nothing of what is transacting in the regions above and around us. By much labor we acquire a superficial acquaintance with a few sensible objects which we find in our present habitation; but we enter and we depart, under a total ignorance of the nature and laws of the spiritual world. One subject in particular, when our thoughts proceed in this train, must often recur upon the mind with peculiar anxiety; that is the immortality of the soul, and the future state of man. Exposed as we are at present to such variety of afflictions, and subjected to so much disappointment in all our pursuits of happiness, why, it may be said, has our gracious Creator denied us the consolation of a full discovery of our future existence, if indeed such an existence be prepared for us?

      Reason, it is true, suggests many arguments in behalf of immortality; Revelation gives full assurance of it. Yet even that Gospel, which is said to have brought "life and immortality to light," allows us to see only "through a glass darkly." "It doth not yet appear what we shall be." Our knowledge of a future world is very imperfect; our ideas of it are faint and confused. It is not displayed in such a manner as to make an impression suited to the importance of the object. The faith even of the best men is much inferior, both in clearness and in force, to the evidence of sense; and proves on many occasions insufficient to counterbalance the temptations of the present world. Happy moments indeed there sometimes are in the lives of pious men; when, sequestered from worldly cares, and borne up on the wing of divine contemplation, they rise to a near and transporting view of immortal glory. But such efforts of the mind are rare, and cannot be long supported. When the spirit of meditation subsides, this lively sense of a future state decays; and though the general belief of it remains, yet even good men, when they return to the ordinary business and cares of life, seem to rejoin the multitude, and to reassume the same hopes, and fears, and interests, which influence the rest of the world. -by Rev. Hugh Blair, D. D.

      The angels would have the disciples see the empty sepulchre, as if that sight were enough to convince them of the certainty of Christ's resurrection. So it was. His disciples were too timid to attempt the removal, and his enemies were determined to hold the dead body in their grasp. The sight of the empty place should therefore be sufficient evidence of Christ's resurrection.

      Let us also "behold the place,'' gaze on the consecrated spot and gather in the wonders with which it is haunted. It is the scene of the mightiest prodigy ever known on earth. There the dead stirred itself, the inanimate Being sprung by his own volition into life. Behold, and acknowledged the Divinity of Christ. "Behold the place;" in being emptied, earth and sea may be said to have given up their dead-- Christ was the representative of the countless myriads of human kind. Behold the change effected by the Redeemer for his followers--the grave, instead of being the home of all that is hideous and revolting, has an angel for its tenant, rich odors for its perfume. The grave has become a bed and death a sleep to those who put faith in His name. Behold it in your tears and sorrow, not as those who have no hope-- in your hopes, that you may look for glorious things from your Forerunner. Behold it, ye who care little for the soul and eternity, and think if Christ can be neglected with impunity--flee to Him as a Savior before He appears as an Avenger. Patiently inspect the empty sepulchre and learn all its lessons. by Rev. Canon H. Melville, D. D.

      And early in the morning, we are told by the Evangelists, these same women started to go to the sepulchre to anoint his body, and found out that he was risen. Why, do you think if they had thought he was going to rise that they would have left that sepulchre? They would have lingered around it; it would have taken more than a hundred Roman soldiers to keep those disciples away from the sepulchre, if they thought he was going to rise. Now, early in the gray of the morning, you could see these women going toward the sepulchre. They had got their spices all ready to anoint that body again, and they were greatly troubled, because they did not know who was going to roll away the stone. And you see them as they draw near to the sepulchre; and the sun has just driven away the darkness of the night, and that beautiful morning is bursting upon the earth, the best morning this world had ever seen. And one says to another, "Who shall roll away the stone?" But a messenger came from yon world of light; he flew faster than the morning light, and arrived first. And he rolled away the stone; and those men that had been sent there by Pilate, to watch and guard that sepulchre, began to tremble, and fell as dead men; they hadn't any power. One angel was enough to roll away that stone; not to let him out, but to let you and I look in to see that the sepulchre was empty, to let the morning light into that sepulchre to light it up that we might know that he is risen, "the first fruits of them that slept." Yes, thank God, he has conquered Death and the grave; and you can shout now, "O grave, where is thy victory!" He went down into the grave and conquered it, and came up out of it; and now he says, "Because I live, ye shall live also." by D. L. Moody

      In the belief of Christ's resurrection, the gifted Baron Bunsen took his solemn and exultant farewell of his deeply-loved wife, saying: "Love, love, we have loved each other; love cannot cease; love is eternal; the love of God is eternal; live in the love of God and Christ; those who live in the love of God must find each other again though we know not how; we cannot be parted; we shall see each other beyond."

      Faith in it made the dying soldier-boy say to his commanding officer after the battle was over: "General, I feel as if I was going to the front." It rung out with the voice of transport, in the utterances of that Dutch lad in the Netherlands, who, with his father, was fastened to the stake by the brutal persecutor Titleman: "Look, my father," he said, amid the flames; "all heaven is opening, and I see a hundred thousand angels rejoicing over us! Let us be glad, for we are dying for the truth." by Bishop Fallows.

"Creature all grandeur, son of truth and light,

Up from the dust! the last great day is bright;

Bright on the holy mountain, round the throne,--

Bright where, in borrowed light, the far stars shone.

Look down! the depths are bright! and hear them cry,

'Light! light!' Look up! 't is rushing down from high

Regions on regions, far away they shine:

'T is light ineffable, 't is light divine!

'Immortal light, and life forevermore!'

Off through the deeps is heard from shore to shore,

Of rolling worlds,--'Man, wake thee from the sod,--

Wake thee from death,--awake!--and live with God!'"