line; they could touch His person and recognise His voice. It is in a similar manner that our resurrection shall be perfected. We cannot, indeed, form to ourselves a complete picture of the details, but we can have no difficulty in accepting the general idea. Even now we often behold gradual approaches to it. The beauty of the inner life may change the very features of the countenance. The thought of the lofty destiny awaiting us may impart something of its nobility to the outward frame. The voice, often lifted up in private praise and prayer, may come to speak in softer and more touching tones than those in which it would otherwise find utterance. And thus we have only to imagine our whole man penetrated and pervaded by the Spirit of God, in order to believe that all about us may be changed, yet so changed that the essence of our personality and our difference from other men shall be as distinct as ever. need any question be raised about the possibility of the mutual recognition of the redeemed in the resurrection-state. The one fact that the Risen Lord, the type of our own resurrection, was recognised by His disciples dispels all hesitation or doubt upon the point.

Nor

While, however, our individuality shall be continued in the future world, the Resurrection of our Lord is not less the pledge of a great and glorious change that we shall then experience. Here, at the very best, the body comes far short of answering the

demands made upon it by one who would walk worthy of the kingdom and glory to which he is called. He would wish to serve God day and night in His temple, but the very alternations of day and night impose upon him the necessity of sleep. Like his Divine Master he would wish to go about continually doing good, but the feet refuse to carry him, and the hands that were raised to bless fall powerless by his side. At every step of his progress he would lift up his heart into the presence-chamber of the Great King, but the deeper the intensity of his feelings the sooner does the bodily constitution decline to endure the strain. Down to the last moment of our earthly existence we bear about with us a body which hampers the soul in its aspirations ; and often, when the visions of heaven are just about to burst upon the eye and the ear, the one is blind to every sight and the other deaf to every sound. "There is a law in the members that warreth with the law of the mind;" "O wretched men that we are! who shall deliver us out of this body of death?"

The Resurrection of our Lord supplies the answer to the Apostle's question. It is the earnest of a time when the conflict between the soul and the body shall be for ever at an end; when the two parts of man's nature shall be in perfect accord and harmony with one another; when the flesh shall no longer struggle against the spirit or the spirit against the flesh; but when the body shall be a willing instrument in the

service of the spirit for that unchecked and uninterrupted performance of the will of God in which the blessedness and glory of our nature must be found, if they are found at all. Then we shall no more groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body; but, as we follow the Lamb whithersoever He goeth, we shall send forth one song of praise," We thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord." The whole revelation of the New Testament breaks down if that union with the Lord which is its central principle is interrupted at any stage of His eternal progress. "Yet a little while, and the world beholdeth Me no more; but ye behold Me, because I shall live, and ye shall live." Our union with Him is not for a time only, but for ever.

Therefore it is that, in the hope of a full, personal, undivided life beyond the grave, we lift up our heads as the hour of our redemption draweth nigh. By the great fact that Christ is risen the New Testament teaches us that, if there be a future life at all, it is we ourselves who live, not vapours, not ghosts, but in our present compound being, with our individual personal lives, recognisable by others and recognising them. We may dismiss the whole doctrine; but to do so we must first get rid of the Resurrection of our Lord. If we accept that fact, we must accept the doctrine of our own resurrection in this form, for it is the only form in which it is taught in Scripture.

What was the case with our Lord must be the case with all His people. In the great day of account no vast array of shadowy figures will issue from the tombs, with nothing to distinguish them from one another. Separated by distinct individualities in this world, they will be not less separated in the next; and, as the Risen Lord was known and clung to by His disciples who had followed Him upon earth, so every member of His mystical body shall be known and clung to in the unity of love by those who, side by side with them, ran His race and fought His fight before they died. It may be thought by some that it is too much to anticipate such results, and that this spiritualising of man, this penetrating his whole frame with the power of the Divine Spirit, this making him a “partaker of the Divine nature," is either inconceivable or that it is at once a humiliation of the Divine and an undue exaltation of the human. But philosophy, in the most aspiring of its modern developments, rejects such a conclusion, and seeks rather to show that humanity itself is God. Religion no less rejects it. The lesson of Scripture is that, if it is the property of our human nature to seek after the Divine, it is also a property of the Divine nature to communicate itself to the human; that neither is satisfied in itself alone; and that, to the full attainment of their mutual desires, each must find itself in the other. Thus it is that, on the one side, St. Paul teaches us that in every age and nation there is an impulse in man to "seek after

God, if haply he may find Him;" and thus it is that, on the other side, our Lord Himself used these remarkable words to the woman of Samaria, "An hour cometh and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth: for the Father also is seeking such, even them that worship Him." Man is seeking after God: God is seeking after man; and the union of the two is the highest revelation both of the Divine and of the human."

If this be so, it follows that that penetrating of man by the Divine spirit which we have seen to be the great lesson of the Resurrection of our Lord, ought not to startle us; and when it does not, what a high and glorious hope does it present! How lofty is that conception of man's destiny which it unfolds! how exalted the result at which it bids us aim! We are often told that the Gospel of Christ fails to do honour to the capabilities of man's nature; that it is unable to stimulate his powers; and that, by its lessons on human corruption and human weakness, it tends to sink him in degradation and hopelessness. How utterly false and groundless is the charge! Nowhere else has so noble an ideal been presented for man to aim at. To be united to the "only God;" to be brought into harmony with the love which is the foundation of all being; to have every jarring element in ourselves for ever done away; to become in