rit, men put them into
practice, and their results gradually speak for themselves. His
followers in every age have seemed fools to many, if not to most, of
their judicious contemporaries; but cheered by His confidence, they
venture on apparently hopeless undertakings, and find that He has
overcome the world.

Jesus' victory over sin works in true disciples a similar conquest.
Christians label any unchristlikeness sin, and they vastly darken the
world with a new sense of its evil, and are themselves most painfully
aware of their own sinfulness. Jesus' conscience has creative power, and
reproduces its sensitiveness in theirs; they are born into a life of
new sympathies and obligations and penitences. By His faith, and
supremely by His cross, He communicates to His followers the assurance
of God's forgiveness which reestablishes their intercourse with Him, and
releases His life in them; and Jesus lays them under a new and more
potent compulsion to live no longer unto themselves, but unto their
brethren.

Jesus' conquest of death is to His followers the vindication of His
faith in God, and God's attestation of Him; and with such a God Lord of
heaven and earth, death has neither sting nor victory; it cannot
separate from God's love; and it is itemized among a Christian's assets.
The face of death has been transfigured. Aristides, explaining the
Christian faith about the year 125 A.D., writes, "And if any righteous
man among them passes from the world, they rejoice and offer thanks to
God; and they escort his body as if he were setting out from one place
to another near." Christians speak of their dead as "in Christ"--under
His all-sufficient control.

_Communion with Jesus in God._ When the Christian through Jesus finds
himself in fellowship with His God and Father, he does not leave Jesus
behind as One whose work is done. He discovers that he can maintain this
fellowship only as he constantly places himself in such contact with the
historic Figure that God can through Him renew the experience. It is by
going back to Jesus that we go up to the Father; or rather, it is
through the abiding memory of Jesus in the world that God reaches down
and lifts us to Himself. And at such times no Christian thinks of Jesus
as a memory, but as a living Friend. To Him he addresses himself
directly in prayer and praise, which would be meaningless were there no
present communication between Jesus and His disciples.

We cannot say that we