ur Father's house, it requires no
further argument to assure us of its "many mansions." The unending
fellowship with Jesus' God of all His true children is an inevitable
inference from what we know His and our God to be. We do not base our
confident anticipation of everlasting life merely upon some saying of
Jesus, which we blindly accept because He said it, nor even upon the
report of His own resurrection from the grave; 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 lo