who thought that there were islands of the sea beyond the setting sun that dyed the western waves, but Columbus went and came back again, and brought their products—­and then the thought became a fact.  Unless you believe that Jesus Christ has come back from ’the bourne from which no traveller returns,’ and has come laden with the gifts of ’happy isles of Eden’ far beyond the sea, there is no certitude upon which a dying man can lay his head, or by which a bleeding heart can be staunched.  But when He draws near, alive from the dead, and says to us, as He did to the disciples on the evening of the day of Resurrection, ‘Peace be unto you,’ and shows us His hands and His side, then we do not only speculate or think a future life possible or probable, or hesitate to deny it, or hope or fear, as the case may be, but we know, and we can say:  ‘All things are ours ... death’ amongst others.  The fact that Jesus Christ has died changes the whole aspect of death to His servant, inasmuch as in that great solitude he has a companion, and in the valley of the shadow of death sees footsteps that tell him of One that went before.

Nor need I do more than remind you how the manner of our Lord’s death shows that He is Lord not only of the dead but of the Death that makes them dead.  For His own tremendous assertion, ’I have power to lay down My life, and I have power to take it again,’ was confirmed by His attitude and His words at the last, as is hinted at by the very expressions with which the Evangelists record the fact of His death:  ‘He yielded up His spirit,’ ‘He gave up the ghost,’ ’He breathed out His life.’  It is confirmed to us by such words as those remarkable ones of the Apocalypse, which speak of Him as ’the Living One,’ who, by His own will, ‘became dead.’  He died because He would, and He would die because He loved you and me.  And in dying, He showed Himself to be, not the Victim, but the Conqueror, of the Death to which He submitted.  The Jewish king on the fatal field of Gilboa called his sword-bearer, and the servant came, and Saul bade him smite, and when his trembling hand shrank from such an act, the king fell on his own sword.  The Lord of life and death summoned His servant Death, and He came obedient, but Jesus died not by Death’s stroke, but by His own act.  So that Lord of Death, who died because He would, is the Lord who has the keys of death and the grave.  In regard to one servant He says, ‘I will that he tarry till I come,’ and that man lives through a century, and in regard to another He says, ‘Follow thou Me,’ and that man dies on a cross.  The dying Lord is Lord of Death, and the living Lord is for us all the Prince of Life.