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ply to reproduce the Life of Christ in the souls of men, by uniting them to Christ, and transforming them into other Christs. In a word it was to give them a new human nature.

Until the Body which God "prepared" Him was brought to a state of perfect "preparedness" by the Resurrection, He had necessarily to speak to them in parables and figures, for the most part, which required the Resurrection to reveal their full meaning. All must have been obscure and unintelligible to the disciples; but now, on the first Easter evening, all is made clear by the reappearance of Christ in the Flesh, and this new revelation of the powers of His Resurrection Body. They understand now what He meant by being born again; they understand now how He could give His Body and Blood to be the food of Christians; they understand now what He meant by saying that the kingdom of God was like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened; they understand now how the kingdom of heaven could be like so many things so utterly diverse the one from the other, so totally unlike the world's conception of a kingdom.

It was because Christ was to dwell in the midst of His Kingdom-the Church; because the Church was not to be a dead, mechanical organization, but the living, moving Body of Christ, "the fulness, the complement, of Him that filleth all in all." In it Christ was to dwell, rejuvenating the children of men, feeding and nourishing them with His own glorified Body, gradually changing them, even as leaven changes the mass into which it is cast, into gods, that so it might be fulfilled, as the Psalmist had said: "I have said ye are gods, and ye are all the children of the Most Highest."

We may well believe that the disciples' joy on seeing their Lord was partly caused by this marvellous revelation of the powers of His glorified Human Nature.

Herein, dear brethren, is our Easter joy made perfect. We rejoiced on Easter Day because of Christ's glorious triumph over death and hell; we rejoiced also because our immortality was assured by His Resurrection. But we shall come far short of perfect Easter joy, unless we learn this other blessed truth about the relation of our Lord's glorified Humanity to our salvation. Without this, the Incarnation is a mere name; the Resurrection a mere marvellous event in the history of the world, which we may wonder at, but which has little or no practical bearing upon our lives; the Church a mere school of moral culture; the Christian religion, not a faith at all, but, shorn of all its supernatural elements, reduced to position of a mere school of thought.

It needs to be more than ever insisted upon in our day that forevermore Jesus is "God manifest in the Flesh." That He is not far from any one of us, but that He dwells in all the integrity of His Divine and Human Natures in the midst of the Church. That His Human Nature was not assumed only that He might be inade capable of dying, but also that He might become the second Adam; that it is not only the instrument of the Atonement, but also the medium through which man may receive Divinity.

Christ's Human Nature is the Ladder between heaven and earth. It is the Way to the Father. It is the Instrument of Rejuvenation. It is the Food and Nourishment of the rejuvenate life. It is the Antidote of Original Sin. It is the means whereby our sinful nature is changed, and made God-like. It is that new principle

of Life which, infused into humanity, restores its lost character, and retraces in it the Divine Image.

It has often been pointed out that Christianity is essentially a religion of a Person, the Person of Jesus. Christ. It is true, Christianity does not go forth and cffer itself to men as an exponent of a new religion; it does not offer itself as the exemplar of a new morality; its unique claim is that it gives to men a new human nature. It reaffirms the Mosaic moral law, to be sure, and binds on men the new law of love; but instead of requiring that these be obeyed by a mere mechanical alteration of moral conduct, it changes man's nature, and so makes virtue not a legal requirement merely, but the natural and normal state of life. "There is, therefore, now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus."

This crown and glory of the Christian Religion is the direct result of the Resurrection. Therein that Human Nature of the God-Man was finally prepared to be communicated, without waste or diminution, to the sons of men, and thus make them literally and truly, "Members of Christ," "Bone of His Bone and flesh of His Flesh," "He in us and we in Him.”

Brethren, let us make this a part of our Easter work: to pay due honor to the Manhood of our glorious King by meditating much upon the nature and powers of our Lord's Risen Body, and so learning by the aid of the Holy Spirit, "the Power of the Resurrection"; the important office which His glorified Humanity fills in the work of our salvation. Then, we, too, like the disciples on the first Easter, will see Him, Risen, Triumphant, Glorious, in our midst, where in very truth He continually dwells, and will like them rejoice with a joy that no man taketh from us.

THE SECOND SUNDAY AFTER EASTER.

THE MYSTERY OF THE ATONEMENT, THE SECRET OF THE GRACE AND POWER OF THE CHRISTIAN LIFE.

TEXT: Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow His steps.-I. St. Peter II. 21.

By the REV. GEORGE MCCLELLAN FISKE, D. D.,
Rector of St. Stephen's Church, Providence, R. I.

'HERE is something of especial pathos and solem

THE

nity in the strain which pervades the services today. We are in the midst of Eastertide. And yet we have an Epistle and Gospel which would not be out of place in Holy Week. The Epistle to St. Peter tells of the Passion of Christ, and how it bears upon our sufferingswhile the Gospel is the tender portrait of the Good Shepherd who giveth His Life for the sheep, a Gospel, which might very fitly accompany the Good Friday Collects. We must not lose sight, in the joy and triumph of Christ Risen and Alive forever more, of the price at which the victory was won.

And then, while our Leader and Champion is past the pain and dying and humiliation, we who feebly follow are this day encompassed by the shadows and gloom of mortality. There are always mourners among the worshipping folk in our churches at Easter. There are always heavy hearts below the lips which sing the gladsome Easter hymns. And so it is well-it is in keeping with the church's exquisite discernment of circumstances

and sense of sympathy-that we should have this kind of Easter Passion-tide. Our Lord has left us an example that we should follow His steps. What a power there is with men in the very mention of Christ's example. Every conscience, every heart responds to that call-and acknowledges that authority. The force of that example none dares nor would dispute. But let us do justice to the fact of the example. This heritage of Christ's example is above that of any other example that we know. It is at once human and superhuman.

It is human-else it could not be an example. To be an example He must have been like us. There must be community of nature and of conditions. There must be likeness in make-up and in surroundings.

While Christ has left us an example because He is so truly man, knowing by His own experience men's trials and temptations, He has not left it as mere men are said to have left memories and examples behind them. Between Christ, considered as truly man, and other men, there is, among other distinctions, this distinction. The legacies of good examples bequeathed us by other men, are the legacies of men who are dead-some of them long dead. The legacy of Christ's example is not the legacy of a dead man. It is the legacy of a Man who is alive—of a living Man. This is one reason why this fact of Christ's example is brought before us in Easter-tidewhen we are considering the truth of Christ living. The example of Christ is not a mere remembrance of the past. It is a truth about One who is a part, perhaps we might better say, the whole, of human life to-day.

As between the examples of two equally good persons, one dead and the other alive, the example of the living

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