There lies in it the idea of repose.  ‘They rest from their labours.’  Sleep restores strength, and withdraws a man at once from effort on the outer world, and from communication from it.  We may carry the analogy into that unseen world.  We know nothing about the relations to an external universe of the departed who sleep in Jesus.  It may be that, if they sleep in Him, since He knows all, they, through Him, may know, too, something—­so much as He pleases to impart to them—­of what is happening here.  And it may even be that, if they sleep in Him, and He wields the energies of Omnipotence, they, through Him, may have some service to do, even while they wait for their house which is from heaven.  But there is no need for, nor profit in, such speculations.  It is enough that the sweet emblem suggests repose, and that in that sleep there are folded around the sleepers the arms of the Christ on whose bosom they rest, as an infant does on its first and happiest home—­its mother’s breast.

But then, besides that, the emblem suggests the idea of continuous and conscious existence.  A man asleep does not cease to be a man; a dead man does not cease to live.  It has often been argued from this metaphor that we are to conceive of the space between death and the resurrection as being a period of unconsciousness, but the analogies seem to me to be in the opposite direction.  A sleeping man does not cease to know himself to be, and he does not cease to know himself to be himself.  That mysterious consciousness of personal identity survives the passage from waking to sleep, as dreams sufficiently show us.  And, therefore, they that sleep know themselves to be.

And, finally, the emblem suggests the idea of waking.  Sleep is a parenthesis.  If the night comes, the morning comes.  ’If winter comes, can spring be far behind?’ They that sleep will awake, and be satisfied when they ‘awake with Thy likeness.’  And so these three things—­repose, conscious, continuous existence, and the certainty of awaking—­all lie in that metaphor.

Now, then, the risen Christ is the only ground of such hope, and faith in Him is the only state of mind which is entitled to cherish it.  Nothing proves immortality except that open grave.  Every other foundation is too weak to bear the weight of such a superstructure.  The current of present opinion shows, I think, that neither metaphysical nor ethical arguments for the future life will stand the force of the disintegrating criticism which is brought to bear upon that hope by the fashionable materialism of this generation.  There is one barrier that will resist that force, and only one, and that is the historical facts that Jesus Christ died, and that Jesus Christ has risen again.  He rose; therefore death is not the end of individual existence.  He rose; therefore life beyond the grave is possible for humanity.  He rose; therefore His sacrifice for the world’s sin is accepted, and I may be delivered from my guilt and my burden.  He rose;