no word of answer to those questions which it most concerns mankind to know.  Here, indeed, Jesus Christ is truly set forth, crucified among us; here life and immortality are brought to light.  But follow us out of this place,—­to our respective pursuits and amusements, to our social meetings, or our times of solitary thought,—­and wherein do we seem to see life and immortality more brightly revealed than to those heathen schools of old?  Do we enjoy any worldly good less keenly, or less shrink from any worldly evil?  Death, which to the heathen view was the end of all things, is to us (so our language goes) the gate of life.  Do we think of it with more hope and less fear than the heathen did?  Christ has risen, and has reconciled us to God.  Is God more to us?—­God now revealed to us as our reconciled Father—­do we oftener think of him, do we love him better, than he was thought of and loved in those heathen schools, which had Homer’s poetry for their only gospel?  We talk of light, of revelation, of the knowledge of God, while verily and really we are walking, not in light, but in darkness:  not in knowledge of God, but in blindness and hardness of heart.

“The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  How great is the loving-kindness of these words,—­how gently does Christ bear with the weakness of his disciples!  But this thought may be the most blessed or the most dangerous thought in the world; the most blessed if it touches us with love, the most dangerous if it emboldens us in sin.  He is full of loving-kindness, full of long-suffering; for days, and weeks, and months, and years he bears with us:  we grieve him, and he entreats; we crucify him afresh, yet he will not come down from the cross in power and majesty; he endures and spares.  So it is for days, and months, and years; for some years it may be to most of us,—­for many years to some of the youngest.  There may be some here who may go on grieving Christ, and crucifying him afresh, for as much as seventy years; and he will bear with them all that time, and his sun will daily shine upon them, and his creatures and his word will minister to their pleasure; and he himself will say nothing to them but to entreat them to turn and be saved.  This may last, I say, to some amongst us for seventy years; to others it may last fifty; to many of us it may last for forty, or for thirty; none of us, perhaps, are so old but that it may last with us twenty, or at the least ten.  Such is the prospect before us, if we like it:  not to be depended upon with certainty, it is true, but yet to be regarded as probable.  But as these ten, or twenty, or fifty, or seventy years pass on, Christ will still spare us, but his voice of entreaty will be less often heard; the distance between him and us will be consciously wider.  From one place after another where we once used sometimes to see him, he will have departed; year after year some object which used once to catch the light from heaven, will have become overgrown,