certain lack of interest in a future
in which we shall be something quite different in constitution from what
we are now. We can think of a time between death and the resurrection in
which we shall be incomplete, but that is tolerable because it is
disciplinary and temporary and looks on to our restitution to full
humanity in the resurrection at the Last Day. And we feel that the
promise, the certainty of this is sealed by our Lord's resurrection from
the dead. We are certain that that took place because it is needful to
the completion of His Work.

The Creed is one: and if one denies one article one speedily finds that
there is an effect on others. The denial of the resurrection is part and
parcel of the attempt to reduce Christianity to a history of something
that once took place which is important to us to-day because it affords
us a standard of life, a pattern after which we are to shape ourselves.
Else should we be very much in the dark. We gain from the Christian
Revelation a conception of God as a kindly Father Who desires His
children to follow the example of His Son. That example, no doubt, must
not be pressed too literally, must be adapted to modern conditions; but
we can get some light and guidance from the study of it. Still, if you
do not care to follow it nothing will happen to you. It is merely a
pleasing occupation for those who are interested in such things. The
affirmation of the resurrection, on the other hand, is the affirmation
of the continuity of the work of God Incarnate; it is an assertion that
Christianity is a supernatural action of God going on all the time, the
essence of which is, not that it invites the believer to imitation of
the life of Christ, so far as seems practical under modern conditions,
but that it calls him to union with Christ; it makes it his life's
meaning to recreate the Christ-experience, to be born and live and die
through the experience of Incarnate God. It fixes his attention not on
what Jesus did but on what Jesus is. It insists on a present vital
organic relation to God, mediated by the humanity of Jesus; and if there
be no humanity of Jesus, if at His death He ceased to be completely
human, then there is no possibility of such a relation to God in Christ
as the Catholic Religion has from the beginning postulated; and unless
we are to continue human there seems no continuing basis for such a
relation to one another in the future as would make the future of any
interes