For us then, as for the men who wrote the Gospel, and for the men who planted the Church and watered it with their blood, the resurrection of Jesus means the return of His Spirit from the place whither it had gone to preach to the spirits in prison and its reunion with the Body which had been laid in the tomb in Joseph’s Garden, and the issuing of perfect God and perfect man from that tomb on the first Easter morning.  That humanity had, no doubt, undergone profound changes to fit it to be the perfect instrument of the spirit of Christ Jesus henceforward.  It is now the resurrection body, the spiritual body of the new man.  We understand that it is now a body fitted for the new conditions of the resurrection life, and we also understand that it is the exemplar of what our risen bodies will be.  They will be endowed with new powers and capacities, but they will be human bodies, the medium of the spirit’s expression and a recognisable means of intercourse with our friends.  We lie down in the grave with a certainty of preserving our identity and of maintaining the capacity of intercourse with those we know and love.  That is what really interests us in the future which would be uninteresting on other terms; and that is what our Lord’s appearances after the resurrection seem to guarantee.  He resumed a human intercourse with those whom He had gathered about Him.  He continued His work of instruction and preparation for the future.  And when at length He left them they were prepared to understand that His departure was but the beginning of a new relation.  But also they would feel much less that there was an absolute break with the past than if He had not appeared to them after the Crucifixion, and they had been left with but a belief in His immortality.  They would, too, now be able to look on to the future as containing a renewal of the relations now changed, to read a definite meaning into His promises that where He is there shall His servants be.

It is much to know that we are immortal:  it is much more to know that this immortality is a human immortality.  One feels in studying the pre-Christian beliefs in immortality that they had very little effectiveness, and that the reason was that there was no real link connecting life in this world with life in the next.  Death was a fearful catastrophe that man in some sense survived, but in a sense that separated his two modes of existence by a great gulf.  Man survived, but his interests did not survive, and therefore he looked to the future with indifference or fear.  This life seemed to him much preferable to the life which was on the other side of the grave.  So far as the Old Testament writings touch on the future world, they touch upon it without enthusiasm.  There is an immense difference between the attitude of the Old Testament saint toward death and that, for instance, of the early Christian martyr.  And the difference is that the martyr does not feel that death will put an end to all he knows and loves and set him, alive