"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.
