ations of the truth of the
Resurrection. The Christian Church is built and still rests on the
fact, luminous and sovereign, that Christ rose from the grave in
fulness and newness of power. To the life beyond, Christ's
resurrection gives reality and humanity and assurance. It confirmed
men's subjective aspirations, it changed them into "things most surely
believed." It makes every Christian certain of a higher life beyond
the grave.

2. Christ has _enriched_ the whole conception of immortality. In the
ancient, as in the savage world to-day, immortality or the continued
duration of life, was a dreary prospect, a sense of desolation rather
than a source of joy, an impoverishment of life, not an enrichment of
it; its scene was a shadowy realm of silence, where there is no voice
of praise nor human warmth and cheer. In some passages in the Old
Testament we find a loftier and clearer utterance. Through his faith
in God, Job reached the idea that death may not be the final word. The
righteous God would not abandon a righteous man. In revealed religion
this faith in a life beyond the grave rested not on any conceptions of
man's nature, but on the character of God, the Eternal Righteousness.
If he has called men into fellowship with Him, His faith is pledged to
them. The Psalmists won their sense of eternal security through their
present fellowship with God. Along this line of religious experience
of a living, holy and gracious God, the true hope of immortality
entered the world. Just as union with God guaranteed to the Psalmist a
life that would never end, so union with the Risen Saviour guarantees
to the Christian triumph over death. Christ has filled this elementary
thought of continued existence with moral content, because He has based
it on a true conception of God. The Christian hope is not merely
"immortality of the soul" but eternal life; and eternal life is not
merely an infinite prolongation of existence in a future state of
being; but is life at its highest and best, the life of fellowship, of
vision, of growing likeness to God, of ample service. It is life in
Christ. It is being with Christ, which is very far better than earthly
life at its worthiest. It is not the mere translation, but the
transformation of earthly values. This faith in immortality is moral
and spiritual; it implies enriched and elevated being, as worthy and
glorious as it is endless.

3.--Christ has so increased the _power_ of