ze of
mythical change or disproportion has had time to gather over those
scenes in the interval. With some differences, no doubt, the world of
this day is yet essentially the same as the world of that day; I
certainly still, in my whole personal consciousness, am the man of that
day, only somewhat developed in experience. Well, what the date of the
battle of Sadowa (Koeniggratz) is to me, such was the date of the
Crucifixion to St Paul, when he wrote from Rome to his dear converts at
Philippi. And I venture to say that, while St Paul's tone about the
Lord of Calvary is of course immeasurably different in the highest
respects from what mine might be had I to speak of the makers of
European history of 1866, it is in one respect just the same. It is as
completely free from the tone of legend unreality, uncertainty. With
the same entire consciousness of matter of fact with which I might
write of the statesmen or generals of my early manhood, he writes of
One who, in _his_ early manhood, overcame death by death, and "shewed
Himself alive after His passion by many infallible proofs."

Only, there is this wonderful difference; that for St Paul the Jesus
Christ of recent history is absolutely One with the Jesus Christ of his
present spiritual experience. The Man of the Cross is also, for him,
the Lord who is exalted to the throne of heaven, and is also so related
to the writer that Paul is "in Christ Jesus," with a proximity and
union which enters into everything. "In Him" are included the very
actions of the disciple's mind and the experiences of his heart. He is
the Lord who lives in the inmost being of His servant, and who yet is
also expected to return from the heavens, to transfigure the servant's
very body into glory. The Christ of history, the Christ of the
soul--it was "this same Jesus" then; it is "this same Jesus" now.

"Can length of years on God Himself exact,
Or make that fiction which was once a fact?
Fix'd in the rolling flood of endless years
The pillar of the eternal plan appears;
The raging storm and dashing wave defies,
Built by that Architect who built the skies." [3]

For me and for my reader may the two aspects of "this same Jesus," the
historical and the spiritual, ever combine in one mighty harmony of
certainty; faith's resting-place to the end, "the rock of our heart,
and our portion for ever"; at once our peace and our power, in life and
in death, and through the eternal day