ey give of man's perfection as consisting of
body, soul, and spirit--these thoughts have flashed light into all the
darkness of the grave, have narrowed to a mere strip of coast-line the
boundaries of the kingdom of death, have proclaimed love as the victor
in her contest with that shrouded horror. The basis of them all is
Christ's Resurrection; its power in this respect is the power to
illuminate, to console, to certify, to wrench the sceptre from the hands
of death, and to put it in the pierced hands of the Living One that was
dead, and is Lord both of the dead and the living.

Further, the Resurrection is treated by Paul as having a power for our
justification, in so far as the risen Lord bestows upon us by His risen
life the blessings of His righteousness. Paul also represents the
Resurrection of Christ as having the power of quickening our Spiritual
life. I need not spend time in quoting the many passages where His
rising from the dead, and His life after the Resurrection, are treated
as the type and pattern of our lives: and are not only regarded as
pattern, but are also regarded as the power by which that new life of
ours is brought about. It has the power of raising us from the death of
sin, and bringing us into a new life of the Spirit. And finally, the
Resurrection of Christ is regarded as having the power of raising His
servants from the grave to the full possession of His own glorious life,
and so it is the power of our final victory over death.

Now I do not know that we are entitled to exclude any of these powers
from view. The broad words of the text include them all, but perhaps the
two last are mainly meant, and of these chiefly the former.

The risen life of Christ quickens and raises us, and that not merely as
a pattern, but as a power. It is only if we are in Him that there is so
real a unity of life between Him and us that there enters into us some
breath of His own life.

That risen life of the Saviour which we share if we have Him, enters
into our nature as leaven into the three measures of meal; transforming
and quickening it, gives new directions, tastes, motives, impulses, and
power. It bids and inclines us to seek the things that are above, and
its great exhortation to the hearts in which it dwells, to fix
themselves there, and to forsake the things that are on the earth, is
based upon the fact that they have died, and 'their life is hid with
Christ in God.' Without that leaven the life tha