unintelligible to all living men as were the Egyptian hieroglyphics half a century ago, though they may be read by the higher intelligences around the throne of Heaven, or they may be read hereafter on earth, for all that we know, by highlyendowed souls. And in the Book of History there is much writing of this kind which eludes the efforts of man's inqusitive and constant gaze. But sometimes also the meaning of God's writing in events is hidden from the mass of men at first sight, but becomes plain to them when the key of its interpretation has been given them by some competent instructor, like the "Mene, mene, tekel upharsin" traced on the wall of the banqueting chamber of the eastern monarch, the sense of which was plain when a Daniel had been summoned to decipher it. Of such handwriting as this, too, history is full; but we must not linger on it, since we have to fix our attention on one great sample, or one particular event,— the Resurrection of our Lord.

Now, that a strictly supernatural occurrence, such as the Resurrection of our Lord, would have a special meaning or several meanings is surely an obvious supposition. The strange thing would be if such an event should occur without any purpose or meaning at all; and St. Paul tells us what, in his inspired judgment, one such meaning was: it was to declare that Jesus Christ was the Son of God.

Endeavour, my brethren, to think what sort of impression would be created in your minds if, after following to the grave one whom you had dearly loved for many years, after listening to the last office of the Church, and watching the sod as it was thrown in upon the coffin, you should see that same friend or relative enter your room with the old look, the wellknown figure and expression, the accustomed voice, remaining just long enough to assure you that he was here again, and then passing swiftly away to comfort and encourage some other mourner. And yet this is in substance what did happen to Mary Magdalene, to the holy women, to Peter, to James, to the two disciples, to the ten on the day of our Lord's rising from the dead. Such events could not but be of great significance, even if the risen one should not utter a word.. The very appearance of such a visitor would be pregnant with meaning, it would declare a good deal that at first we should find it hard to put in words about the unseen world and this, about life and death, about the ways of God, about the destiny.

of man. "But why," you may ask, "why should our Lord's Resurrection have the higher and particular effect of declaring Him to be the Son of God?" Others, you may well urge, had visited the realms of death and had returned to life, who were not declared by this awful experience to be the Divine Son. We need not travel beyond the records of the Gospel history in order to meet with the widow's son at Nain, and with Lazarus at Bethany. Certainly in these cases resurrection to life was a signal token of the Divine favour, but it left them as it found them, members of the human family, still subject to the law of death.

You will allow this and much more.

What was it in our Lord's case which invested His Resurrection with this declaratory force which the Apostle ascribes to it? Now, the answer is first of all that the Resurrection of our Lord was a verification of the proof which He had voluntarily offered of His own claim. The Jewish doctors had understood the words of the Psalm addressed to the Messiah, "Thou art My Son, this day have I begotten Thee," not only of His birth beforetime, as it is understood in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but also of His rising from the dead. And in this sense it is employed by St. Paul in that wonderful appeal to the Jewish conscience which he made in the Synagogue at Antioch in Pisidia, the Scripture bearing its own witness to the depth below depth of meaning which lies in its very simplest word. And therefore our Lord, knowing what was involved in the claim to be Messiah, foretold His Resurrection certainly on six, probably on more, occasions, and it was in this fulfilment of His own prediction, a prediction based on the deeper sense of the ancient Scriptures, that St. Paul recognised a declaration of the Divine Sonship of Christ.

The Resurrection was an intervention of the Almighty Father on behalf of His well-beloved Son, it was an assertion by the Son of His real relation with the Father, it was a proof that the certainties of the future and the laws of the physical world were alike subject to His supreme control. It was an event in the manner of its accomplishment so altogether exceptional and striking that the Apostle's appeal to it as declaratory of our Lord's Divinity is if the expression might be allowed-only natural. Our Lord Himself had summoned the widow's son to rise from the bier, he had summoned

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Lazarus to issue from the recesses of the tomb, but no form of majesty or power stood by His grave, no voice of authority was heard to speak. When before the dawn His human soul, returning from the regions of the dead, reunited itself with the holy body that lay in the sepulchre, and passed forth into the world of living men, it was a declaration that He Who had died and was buried was the Son of God.

But further, in our Lord's case, the Resurrection did not stand alone. It is abstractly conceivable that the foolish or the bad might be raised from the dead by superhuman power; one day we Christians know they will be in order "to give account of the things done in the body." In our Lord's case Resurrection from the dead was combined with absolute holiness and wisdom, with words "such as never man spake," with a life which none who had witnessed it could convict of sin,-in short, with a manifestation of truth and goodness which had never before been offered to the human conscience. The Resurrection was the fitting complement to the life and teaching of our Lord. It confirmed the anticipations which that life and teaching naturally raised; it was the countersign in the sphere of physical being of a judgment which had already been formed in the sphere of instructed conscience. Had our Lord lived and died, and then rotted in His grave, then His life would have died away in time from the memories of men; had He risen-it is an impossible supposition -without having lived His life, His Resurrection would have been merely a blank wonder, appealing only to the imagination and saying nothing to the sense of right and truth. As it is, it proclaims to all the world what disciples like Peter at Cæsarea Philippi had owned before at their Master's feet, it proclaims that He Who was crucified, dead and buried, is the Son of God, declared to be such by His Resurrection from the dead.

But the Apostle says that the declaration of the Divine Sonship of Christ which was made by the Resurrection was made "with power." The Resurrection did not hesitatingly suggest that our Lord might possibly be the Son of God; it amounted, when taken together with His life and character and teaching, to a demonstration irresistible and overwhelming-at least for the Apostle himself—that He was the Son of God. I say, "for the Apostle himself," because, looking at the connection of the passage, it is scarcely open to doubt

that the expression "with power" points first of all to a personal experience.

Saul of Tarsus, at that time an active young rabbi in Jerusalem, strongly attached to the cause of the Pharisee party, was not one of the privileged company to whom our risen Redeemer showed Himself during the great forty days. As an unconverted Jew he would have looked at the person and work of Jesus through an atmosphere discoloured by false reports and by implacable controversial passion. For Saul, the rabbi, Jesus was only a teacher who had learned the trick of winning access to the popular ear, and had established for himself in the minds of the uneducated many the character and the authority of a prophet, a teacher moreover whose influence was steadily directed against that of the representatives of the established order of things in Jerusalem, and who had only met with his deserts when he was put to a cruel death by the Roman authorities. The tragedy of Calvary, he would have said at the time, would be a nine days' wonder, and then other persons and subjects of interest would come to the front and all would be forgotten.

Nor would this judgment be disturbed by the rumours which may have reached Saul's ears that there had been one or more apparitions of Jesus after His death. Saul's robust scepticism would have whispered to itself that rumours of this sort were only to be expected among the credulous and disappointed followers whom Jesus had misled, and that they were not deserving of serious consideration. And so he would have gone on his way in his bitter sincerity, even going so far as to place himself at the disposal of the persecuting party-not his own-which filled the highest places in the Jewish priesthood, and to take a foremost part in the cruelties by which it was hoped to stamp out the very name of the infant Church. And then came the journey to Damascus, and that scene among the low hills of the desert some eight miles from the city gate, which was to change the foremost persecutor of Christ into the most devoted of His Apostles. And what was it that that scene brought home with irresistible power to the mind of Saul of Tarsus? Many truths, no doubt, but this pre-eminently, that Jesus, of Whom he had dreamed as stricken and silenced for ever in the stillness and corruption of the tomb, was alive, and ruling men and events from the clouds of heaven. And how and

since what date this had come to be, Saul would have learned from Ananias of Damascus, and still more when he went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and had cross-questioned first this. Apostle and then that, James and Thomas, and the penitent and radiant Magdalene, and the two disciples who walked to Emmaus, and as many as he would while passing through Galilee of those five hundred who had seen the Lord on one single occasion.

Of the great fact there was evidence enough and to spare, if only there was a mind open to receive it, and when the fact that Jesus Who was crucified had thus risen from the dead was established in the mind of Paul as a certainty beyond all discussion, how inevitably would it have changed the whole way of looking at all else about Jesus. It was then Jesus, and not himself or his instructors, Who held the true key to those ancient Scriptures; it was the teaching of Jesus, and not that of the Rabbinical schools, which followed on in a direct line from Moses and the prophets. Those miracles of Jesus at which, with other Pharisees, he had so often scoffed were only what might be expected in the air of Messianic prophecies, and this crowning wonder of all, which Jesus had predicted as designed to follow on His death, lifted yet further and more completely the veil that hung before the eyes of the astonished and humbled rabbi, and showed that He Who could thus make the past and present alike minister to His glory, He Who could rule at once all the generations of man, and mould at pleasure the forces of nature, He Who could lie as a corpse in the darkness of the grave, and then, speaking from the heavens, could bend into utter submission the mind and the will of His stoutest adversary, must be indeed of more than human stature, must be indeed Divine.

To St. Paul the Resurrection was a revelation of the Divinity of the Son of God, made "with power." If to St. Paul, much more, we may well think, to those who saw the risen Redeemer once and again,-saw Him, conversed with Him, ate with Him, touched Him. Such certainly was the effect on that Apostle who was, it might secm, naturally of a sceptical turn of mind, although, as our Collect says, "for the more confirmation of the faith," he was doubtful of Christ's Resurrection. What was Thomas's exclamation when our Lord offered His hands and His side to the