their personal desire that they might escape from that trial by the path which seemed possible to the early Christians—­viz. that of surviving until the return of Jesus Christ from Heaven, when they would be ’clothed upon with the house which is from Heaven,’ without the necessity of stripping off that with which at present they are invested.  Then he says—­and this is a very remarkable thought—­that just because this instinctive shrinking from death and yearning for the glorified body is so strong in the Christian heart, that is a sign that there is such a glorified body waiting for us.  He says, ’we know that if our house ... were dissolved, we have a building of God.’  And his reason for knowing it is this, ‘for in this we groan.’  That is a bold position to say that a yearning in the Christian consciousness prophesies its own fulfilment.  Our desires are the prophecies of His gifts.  Then, on this certainty—­which he deduces from the fact of the longing for it—­on this certainty of the glorious, ultimate body of the Resurrection he bases his willingness expressed in the text, to go through the unwelcome process of leaving the old house, although he shrinks from it.

So, then, Christian faith does not destroy the natural reluctance to put aside the old companion of our lives.  The old house, though it be smoky, dimly lighted, and, by our own careless keeping, sluttish and grimy in many a corner, yet is the only house we have ever known, and to be absent from it is untried and strange.  There is nothing wrong in saying ‘we would not be unclothed but clothed upon.’  Nature speaks there.  We may reverently entertain the same feelings which our Pattern acknowledged, when He said, ’I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened until it be accomplished.’  And there would be nothing sinful in repeating His prayer with His conditions, ‘If it be possible, let this cup pass from Me.’

But then the text suggests to us the large Christian possessions and hope which counterwork this reluctance, in the measure in which we live lives of faith.  There is the assurance of that ultimate home in which all the transiency of the present material organisation is exchanged for the enduring permanence which knows no corruption.  The ‘tent’ is swept away to make room for the ‘building.’  The earthly house is dissolved in order that there may be reared round the homeless tenant the house eternal, ‘not made with hands,’ God’s own work, which is waiting in the heavens; because the power that shall frame it is there.  Not only that great hope of the ’body of His glory,’ with which at the last all true souls shall be invested, but furthermore, ‘the earnest of the spirit,’ and the blessed experiences therefrom, resulting even here, ought to make the unwelcome necessity less unwelcome.  If the firstfruits be righteousness and peace and joy of the Holy Ghost, what shall the harvest be?  If the ‘earnest,’ the shilling given in advance, be so precious, what will the whole wealth of the inheritance which it heralds be when it is received?