their abodes to make all the rest of their lives one calm aspiration
for, and patient expectation of, the return of the Lord. These
primitive Christians expected that Jesus Christ would come speedily.
That expectation was disappointed in so far as the date was
concerned, but after nineteen centuries it still remains true that
all vigorous and vital Christian life must have in it, as a very
important element of its vitality, the onward look which ever is
anticipating, which often is desiring, and which constantly is
confident of, the coming of the Lord from Heaven. The Resurrection
has for its consequences, its sequel and corollary, first the
Ascension; then the long tract of time during which Jesus Christ is
absent, but still in divine presence rules the world; and, finally,
His coming again in that same body in which the disciples saw Him
depart from them. And no Christian life is up to the level of its
privileges, nor has any Christian faith grasped the whole articles of
its creed, except that which sets in the very centre of all its
visions of the future that great thought--He shall come again.

Questions of chronology have nothing to do with that. It stands there
before us, the certain fact, made certain and inevitable by the past
facts of the Cross and the Grave and Olivet. He has come, He will
come; He has gone, He will come back. And for us the life that we
live in the flesh ought to be a life of waiting for God's Son from
Heaven, and of patient, confident expectancy that when He shall be
manifested we also shall be manifested with Him in glory.

So much, then, for life--calm, persistent in every duty, and animated
by that blessed and far-off, but certain, hope, and all of these
founded upon the vision and the faith of a risen Lord. What have
fears and cares and distractions and faint-heartedness and gloomy
sorrow to do with the eyes that have beheld the Christ, and with the
lives that are based on faith in the risen Lord?

II. So, secondly, consider what death becomes to those who have seen
Christ risen from the dead.

'Some are fallen asleep.' Now that most natural and obvious metaphor
for death is not only a Christian idea, but is found, as would be
expected, in many tongues, but yet with a great and significant
difference. The Christian reason for calling death a sleep embraces a
great deal more than the heathen reason for doing so, and in some
respects is precisely the opposite of that, inasmuch as to