tomb of Lazarus, strove to give these mourners a more substantial comfort than these far-away fancies of the common tradition.

He did this by a word and an act, the one to show how true was the other; but we will speak only of the word.

1. His first purpose was to get their minds away from death; He will not let them think of it, but gives them instead life, and crowds it upon them in all ways possible.

There is but one natural fact to which Christ showed antipathy. We have no indication that climate, or storm, or heat, the weariness of deserts, or the roughness of mountains, moved Him to any word or thought of dissatisfaction. There was no impatience with youth; no sadness over age. He did not sigh over the brevity of life, or human frailty, or the variety of allotments. So far as we can gather, He was in profound sympathy with the natural order of the world, and of human life, save only in respect of its end. Death itself is a natural and fit event, and must have been regarded by Christ with no more aversion than the night or the tempest. But the fact had been so sunk in its associations, and identified with fears so horrible and conceptions so false; it stood for so much that was antagonistic to Himself, that He regarded it with aversion, and shrank from all mention or recognition of it. He set the whole weight of his thought and speech against what was known as death. There is a fine, illuminating significance in the fact of his indisposition to use the word. We observe in ourselves

a reluctance to utter certain words because their associations are so bad or painful. The word is an open gate through which all the evil and bitterness it represents pours in upon us, and we seek for ambiguous and milder phrases when forced to utterance. And the finer the nature, the keener is the sensitiveness to such association of speech and fact. Death, as it was commonly regarded, was a hateful thing to Christ, and He would not name it. And so He said that the daughter of Jairus was not dead, but asleep. The mortal change had come, but that which the people meant had not come. They thought that some dark and dreadful change had come upon her spirit; that she had entered upon a long and gloomy sleep in the grave; that a cessation of life in its fullness has taken place till the last great day. But Christ will not countenance such views, and says that no such change had come: she is rather asleep; her life itself, in all its grand and beautiful functions, is still going on aside from the closed eyes and the pulseless form. He showed the same reluctance to apply the word when Lazarus died, and spoke of him as sleeping, till the dullness of his companions forced him to use the ordinary word. He evidently intends to teach another use of words as to the close of life, to inaugurate another phrase in place of "death.” The conception He desires to establish is so different, that He clothes it in a new word, instead of striving to put a new meaning into an old word.

Why have we not learned the blessed lesson, or rather why have we forgotten it? for the early be

lievers, fully taught by the resurrection of Christ, caught at once the remembered hints, and always spoke of physical death as sleep. St. Luke writes of Stephen, though his life was "dashed out by cruel stones," that he "fell asleep." And St. Paul writes many times over of those who have "fallen asleep," and St. Peter of the fathers who "fell asleep." They cherished the new word with fondness, wrote it upon their tombs, and devised emblems to set it forth. Even now in the catacombs of Rome, may be read such words as these: "Sleeping in Jesus;" "He sleeps in peace." Sleep is peace; to sleep in peace, then, how restful! How fresh and strong must be the awaking after such sleep!

If Christ had done nothing more for humanity than give to it this word sleep in place of death, he would have been the greatest of benefactors. To that which seems to us the worst thing He has given the best name, and the name is true. It is a great thing that we are permitted to take that almost dearest word in our tongue-sleep and give it to death; sleep that ends our cares and relieves us from toil, that links day to day and shuts out the horror of darkness, that checks with pleasant suggestion the current of evil, that soothes and ends the fever of daily life, that begins in weariness and ends in strength, that keeps soul and body quiet while God fills again the exhausted lamp of life, that lets the mind into the liberty of dreams and perhaps suffers it to bathe in the original fountain of life; it is no small or unmeaning thing that

Christ taught us to apply this word to that seeming loss and horror hitherto called death. This is not sentiment nor poetry, except as sentiment and poetry stand for what is most real and substantial. Christ did not utter pleasant deceptions by the grave of his friend Lazarus; He taught new truth about death, that it is not what it seems, a loss and horror, a matter of entombment and corruption, of ghostly waiting in the under-world, of disembodied and half-suppressed existence till the last great day at the end of the world. He puts all this aside, and invests it in a new atmosphere and surrounds it with different suggestions. It is to life what sleep is to the day. Sleep rests and restores the body to a fuller and fresher life. Christ would not have called death sleep merely because of its external likeness; his thought struck deeper than that. He meant that death does for us what sleep does for the body: repairs, invigorates, and repeats for us the morning of life.

Amongst the profoundest words of Shakespeare are those in which he speaks of sleep as "great Nature's second course.' In a profounder sense still, the sleep of death ushers in the "second course of nature, even the life that shall never know death nor sleep.

2. His next purpose is to get them to identify Himself with the resurrection; or, rather, to supplant it and the far-off life it indicates, with Himself and his life. Martha had spoken of a general resurrection in the last day-not necessarily a spiritual fact nor having a spiritual bearing, a mere

matter of destiny, like birth and death, a distant mysterious event. Christ draws it near, takes it out of time, vitalizes it, puts it into the category of faith, and connects it with Himself. He says: Do not think of the resurrection in that way, as a final, world-end event, and thus suffer all the natural gloom and bitterness of death; instead, transfer your thoughts on the matter to me; consider me as the resurrection, and that whoever believes in me is absolutely beyond the reach of death, as it has been hitherto regarded.

But how is it that believing in Christ thus puts us beyond the reach and power of death? - a fit question and capable of answer, for this process has a philosophy and traceable order. Some may prefer to believe that this assurance is of the nature of a promise, and that those who believe in Christ are greatly strengthened and upheld by Him in the hour of death. This is undoubtedly true, but it is the small part of a much larger truth. Christ had in mind something of greater scope than momentary ministration to the dying. This is comparatively a small matter; for how many die instantly; how many sicken and die in utter unconsciousness; the vast majority with benumbed perceptions and sensibilities. It was doubtless intended we should go out of the world as unconsciously as we came into it. It cannot therefore be to meet so rare and brief an experience as conscious agony of death that Christ makes this statement. The entire truth that Christ had in mind was this: that faith in Himself, by its own law, works away from death