t, and rest with singing in what Jesus is in His finished work
as our sanctification, as we rest and rejoice in Him, that we shall be
made partakers of His Holiness. It is the day of rest, is the day that
God has blessed, the day of blessing and gladness; and it is the day He
blessed that is His holy day. Holiness and blessedness are inseparable.

But is not this at variance with the teaching of Scripture and the
experience of the saints? Are not suffering and sorrow among God's
chosen means of sanctification? Are not the promises to the broken in
heart, the poor in spirit, and the mourner? Are not self-denial and the
forsaking of all we have, the crucifixion with Christ and the dying
daily, the path to holiness? and is not all this more matter of sorrow
and pain than of joy and gladness?

The answer will be found in the right apprehension of the life of
faith. Faith lifts above, and gives possession of, what is the very
opposite of what we feel or experience. In the Christian life there is
always a paradox: what appear irreconcilable opposites are found side by
side at the same moment. Paul expresses it in the words, 'As dying, and,
behold, we live; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making
many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing all things.' And elsewhere
thus, '_When_ I am weak, _then_ am I strong.' The apparent contradiction
has its reconciliation, not only in the union of the two lives, the
human and the Divine, in the person of each believer, but specially in
our being, at one and the same moment, partakers of the death and the
resurrection of Christ. Christ's death was one of pain and suffering, a
real and terrible death, a rending asunder of the bonds that united soul
and body, spirit and flesh. The power of that death works in us: we must
let it work mightily if we are to live holy; for in that death He
sanctified Himself, that we ourselves might be sanctified in truth. Our
holiness is, like His, in the death to our own will, and to all our own
life. But--this we must seek to grasp--we do not approach death from the
side from which Christ met it, as an enemy to be conquered, as a
suffering to be borne, before the new life can be entered on. No, the
believer who knows what Christ is as the Risen One, approaches death,
the crucifixion of self and the flesh and the world, from the
resurrection side, the place of victory, in the power of the Living
Christ. When we were baptized into Christ, we we