So, dear friends, the risen Christ gives us something for faith to lay hold of, and will make it the hand by which we grasp His strong hand, which lifts us ’out of the horrible pit and the miry clay, and sets our feet upon a rock.’  But if He lie dead in the grave your faith is vain, because it grasps nothing but a shadow; and it is vain as being purposeless; you are yet in your sins.

The last thought is that the risen Christ gives us the certitude of our Resurrection.  I do not for a moment mean to say that, apart from the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, the thought, be it a wish or a dread, of immortality, has not been found in men, but there is all the difference in the world between forebodings, aspirations, wishes it were so, fears that it might be so, and the calm certitude that it is so.  Many men talked about a western continent, but Columbus went there and came back again, and that ended doubt.  Many men before, and apart from Jesus, have cherished thoughts of an immortal life beyond the grave, but He has been there and returned.  And that, and, as I believe, that only puts the doctrine of immortality upon an irrefragable foundation; and we can say, ’Now, I know that there is that land beyond.’  They tell us that death ends everything.  Modern materialism, in all its forms, asserts that it is the extinction of the personality.  Jesus Christ died, and went through it, and came out of it the same, and I will trust Him.  Brethren, the set of opinion amongst the educated and cultured classes in England, and all over Europe, at this moment, proves to anybody who has eyes to see, that for this generation, rejection of immortality will follow certainly on the rejection of Jesus Christ.  And for England to-day, as for Greece when Paul sent his letter to Corinth, the one light of certitude in the great darkness is the fact that Jesus Christ hath died, and is risen again.

If you will let Him, He will make you partakers of His own immortal life.  ‘The first fruits of them that slept’ is the pledge and the prophecy of all the waving abundance of golden grain that shall be gathered into the great husbandman’s barns.  The Apostle goes on to represent the resurrection of ‘them that are Christ’s’ as a consequence of their union to Jesus.  He has conquered for us all.  He has entered the prison-house and come forth bearing its iron gates on His shoulders, and henceforth it is not possible that we should be holden of it.  There are two resurrections—­one, that of Christ’s servants, one that of others.  They are not the same in principle—­and, alas, they are awfully different in issue.  ’Some shall wake to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.’

Let me beseech you to make Jesus Christ the life of your dead souls, by humble, penitent trust in Him.  And then, in due time, He will be the life of your transformed bodies, changing these into the likeness of the body of His glory, ’according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself.’