Faith and Knowledge: Sermons

THE RISEN CHRIST.

“I am He tliat liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore.” — Kev. i. 18.

TN a few hours the great festival day of our religion will have passed by once more. To the large majority, no doubt, it will have passed without awakening emotions of any kind. It is not easy for most people to feel the anniversaries of the Church. Sluggishness of imagination, habitual secularity of thought and habit, absorption in the present or the future, combine to make men’s hearts cold when the Church calls them to stand before the cradle at Bethlehem, the Cross on Calvary, or the empty tomb in Joseph’s garden. Yet many there are, I doubt not, who, as they knelt at the altar this morning, were filled with a measure of the same joy with which the disciples “were glad when they saw the Lord” once more in the midst of them; who had waited for this Easter morning as people sometimes watch for the sun to rise from the sea, that they may mark for once the progress of that daily miracle which floods the world with light and life. For them the risen Christ is indeed the Sun of their existence, and therefore it is without any effort or strain that they welcome their Easters as they return, and say with all sincerity, “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” It is not to such that I offer my words this evening. They need no homilies to help them to keep Easter fitly. Enough for them to join in the majestic anthem which celebrates the event of the day, and “to keep the feast with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” Nor do I address myself to those, if there be any such here, who care for none of these things, who let even Holy Week and Easter pass without a thought of their Eedeemer, and of the immeasurable importance of the events which we are now commemorating. Eather I speak to those who wish to join in the Church’s songs of triumph — who perhaps in former days sang their Easter hymns with no feigned exultation, but who feel now that their sky is overcast; that their thanksgivings are cold, perhaps almost insincere; that a painful though inarticulate misgiving troubles their hearts, and threatens to turn their joy into sorrow. They long to see their risen Lord, as they perhaps saw Him in former years; but their eyes are holden, they see Him not; and so, like Mary Magdalene, they stand without at the sepulchre weeping. Am I wrong in supposing that there are probably some such in this building? Alas! no; the atmosphere of the world is about us all; few of us escape its influence. There are few who do not know what it is to sigh before the empty tomb, “because they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid Him.”