fact. We are here to bless the Most High for a fact; we are assembled for the express purpose of offering our heartiest and best bodily, mental, and spiritual thanksgiving for the consummation of a splendid, glorious victory.

Go through all Christendom to-day, see and answer; is there anything in the worshipful acts of millions to indicate that we have conspired together to bolster up an obsolete error, to promote an effete superstition, to circulate a crazy hallucination? No. The Man who died day before yesterday is risen, and He is alive forevermore. You know all this, beloved. You believe it. Thank God that you do, and praise Him with exultation that Christ hath gained the victory.

Here we might pause abruptly, and let our Easter hymns ring out, and many of us would feel no loss, that a sermon had not been preached. "This is the Day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it." But bethink you, does not this Holy Festival attract to our spiritual abode many whose minds are set against the truth we confess, others on the verge of acknowledgment, others yet whose faith in the Resurrection needs to be strengthened by argument which they have neither the time nor the inclination to build up?

now

Bear with me, then, while I turn my attention,

at a time when the externals are before

them, to the real or fancied objectors to the cardinal truth of Christianity; for it is the hinge upon which hangs the massive door separating between a Heaven of light and peace and blessedness, and an earth of gloom, bloodshed and misery. Break that hinge, and no combined power of men and angels is able to open the kingdom of Heaven to the inhabitants of this world. Let it stand,

and a child in years and understanding can enter, can look fearlessly back upon the most terrible realities that have ever oppressed humanity, sin, sorrow, death, and can gaze without irreverence upon mysteries more profound than our own marvellous and complex being.

There are those who have come here to-day in the same spirit of loving devotion as the holy women of old, the three Marys with an offering of their hearts to God, but with little or no thought of the reality of Christ's Resurrection. And they say among themselves, with doubt in the success of their mission-"Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the sepulchre?" Dear, kind souls, look. Don't you see that the stone is rolled away.

True, you could not have moved

it, for it was very great. But Christ has done so, and is up and gone, because death could not hold Him. Go in, stoop down and see where the Lord lay, but do not think to find Him there. He is risen, as He said.

With a certain class of minds which have a leaning to "culture," some, too, who have attained most honorable distinction as literary guides and leaders in philosophies, there is a habit of thought which, while fully admitting the desirability of Christian commemorations as popular safeguards, as a high grade of entertainment, helpful to culture, and educating in its influence, finds no underlying basis of these rites and ceremonies. "Let them alone; they do some good and little or no harm,” say they.

"If numbers of people, especially the ignorant and unlettered, are elevated by making the rejuvenation of Spring a symbol of their possible improvement, why, by all means, leave them in the undisturbed possession of

this children's theater. Let them enjoy it and profit by it."

Now what is this but for men to mass their strength and roll the stone back to the mouth of the sepulchre and say "It is all a mistake. Jesus isn't risen at all. His body is corrupting in the grave, and we have just decently put the stone in the place from which an earthquake shook it." "Keep your Christmas and your Easter if you want to, for religion is a handmaid to culture, but don't ask us to believe your doctrine."

But, wait a bit, gentlemen and ladies of this school. Methinks we cannot part with you without thanking you for your obliging disposition, and begging you to accept a keepsake of us. Don't decline it. We really mean you to take it and put it where it will remind you of us who are helping on your work of elevating humanity. Here it is in a few simple expressions.

Christ is risen! We know this. The unlettered know it. Men and women of just as good intelligence and as perfect refinement as yourselves know this. We haven't just now found it out. The Church has known it for upwards of 1800 years-to be exact, for 1898 years. The proof is not, as you would have people believe (as the Jews desired at the time), that three women found the sepulchre empty, the disciples having come by night and removed the body. No. But that men and women, plenty of them just as hardheaded and practical as you, saw Christ on earth alive, walking, speaking and eating. Of this there can be no more doubt than there is that you are alive and that some of your distinguished company have written books.

With all due deference to your talents, we decline utterly to accept of your permission to keep on as we do

in educational work. We neither need, nor ask, your approval of our actions in this matter; for let us say to you candidly that the burden of disproof is wholly on your side. If you don't believe that Christ has risen you would better reassure yourselves about it. For your theories have been met and exploded hundreds of years. There were people in the second century who called themselves Gnostics, who thought they knew something, and did know something; but like you and me and the rest of mankind, they didn't know everything. You are simply giving out one form of their doctrine revamped.

Your anti-miracle view-Mr. Hume's legacy to you -if not corrected by common sense, would cause you to disbelieve not only your ears but your own eyes, and, shall I say it, your own brains.

The Resurrection of Christ is not incredible; because men an hundred to one actually do believe it. It would be just as sensible for us to deny that you have brains because your logic is defective, as for you to deny the Resurrection because a few people who have spent all their lives studying physical operations or language and its uses cannot comprehend a miracle. If you do want to reason about the matter, weigh the evidences for truth; but don't set out with a theory which you cannot possibly substantiate. To say that a miracle is impossible is to say that you yourselves are all-wise. To say that it is incredible is to fly in the face of everyday facts. Miracles are believed, therefore they are credible.

You assert a plan in the universe, a fixed order in Nature a statement which we all accept. But that plan is a great deal wider than phenomena, and that order is not without numberless variations. Who has divulged

to you the mind of the great First Cause? And how de you show that those extraordinary actions which we call miracles are not in His original plan? That order of Nature is determined "not by necessity or fate, but by a will which can at pleasure innovate upon or reverse it."

If you will lie on your back upon the grass, hold an apple in your hand, and silently look upward into the sky, you will overcome two laws of nature, suspend one and alter the appearance of a fourth. You will prevent the natural growth of vegetation, overcome the law of gravitation, disuse the faculty of speech, and see the sun, to all seeming, moving from left to right. And yet, by your proposition that miracles cannot happen, you deny to an infinite Being the power of legislating for and controlling His works, while you exercise your own ability to change laws which you have no power to make, and handle objects that you could not create, if your life depended upon your doing so.

*

"The power to work miracles, understand, is implied in the power which created nature. * and if the education, if the improvement, if the rescuing from darkness and from evil of a created rational mind or soul be God's noblest purpose in creation and in providence, then if we believe Him to be wise and good as well as almighty, we shall expect Him to make the world of matter instruct and improve us by deviating, if need be, from its accustomed order, no less than by observing it." Your very best reasoning, then, is met at every point. But this is all antecedent.

We assert that a miracle has happened: Christ died and rose again. We challenge your counter evidence, and ask no pardon for our position. It is absolutely, unassailable upon the best evidence of a physical occur