these are too slight foundations for our assured expectation.  We rest it firmly upon what we know of His and our Father.  Immortality is not a mere guess nor a fervent wish; we have solid and substantial experience of what God is from all that He has done for His children and for ourselves.  And experience worketh hope.  Faith looks both backwards and forwards, to what God has done and to what He consistently must do; and all the while faith looks upwards, and in His face reads a love that will not let us go.

The Easter victory of Jesus is the vindication of His own faith.  God, as Lord of heaven and earth, is involved in our world’s history; He has been responsible for its outcome from the beginning.  If He let the truest Son He ever had end His career in defeat and failure, He is a faithless and untrustworthy God.  Calvary was the supreme venture of faith; Jesus staked everything on the responsiveness of the universe to love, in the trust that the God of the universe is love.  “If Christ hath not been raised, your faith is vain.”  But if the seeming triumph of wrong over right, of ignorance over truth, of selfishness over sacrifice, which took place at Golgotha be but the prelude to a vaster victory, then the Lord of earth has cleared Himself, and proved Himself worthy of the confidence of His children.

And of the fact of that victory not only the first disciples are witnesses, but every man and woman since in whose life Christ has been and is a present force.  Explain as we may the details of the resurrection narratives, conceive as we please of the manner in which Christ made Himself known to His followers in His post-resurrection appearances long ago, we know that He is “no dead fact stranded on the shore of the oblivious years,” but a living force in our world today, and that Easter triumphs are reenacted wherever His Spirit animates the lives of men.  History again and again has demonstrated that His labor has not been vain in God; that the whole structure and fabric of things responds to trust and love; that careers such as His cannot be holden of death, but find an ally in the universe itself, which sends them on through the years conquering and to conquer.  That demonstration in history confirms Jesus’ trust in God, sets a public seal which the whole world can see to the correctness of His testimony to Him whom He found in the unseen, and in whose cause He laid down His life.

And Jesus has made still another contribution to the answer of our question:  it is through Him that we form our pictures of the life to which we look forward so certainly.  The New Testament expectations center about Jesus Himself:  “With Me in paradise;” “Where I am, there also shall my servant be;” “I go to prepare a place for you;” “So shall we ever be with the Lord.”  Men who had experienced Christ’s hold upon them, through all the divisive circumstances of life, had no doubt of His continuing grasp upon them through death; they spoke of the Christian dead as “the dead in Christ”—­the dead under His transforming control.  Not death nor life could separate them from His love.