ence represented in the first part of the psalm comes the reviving consolation and exaltation of the last part. The utterance of the words, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" in full sincerity, brought with it the answer of God by bringing with it, through the laws of a trained and educated memory (one of God's usual ways of helping his children), the assurance of deliverance and conquest. And so the taste of death absorbed all the bitterness of it, and the drinking of it was painless and peaceful, so that with his departing breath he could softly breathe the prayer of perfect faith, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit." Then, with his great work still before his mind and the sense that it was completed, the last words were spoken, "It is finished."

If the Gentile centurion bore witness that he died like a son of God, he meant no metaphysical dogma; for he could not have comprehended such a thing. If I say he died like the Son of God, I do not necessarily mean any metaphysical dogma; though I believe such dogma cannot go beyond the truth, however it may fall short of it. I may only mean that this man, who believed and proclaimed himself to be the Jewish Christ, the head man of our race, the man who should rescue us from an evil estate and bring us into a new estate of restored divine sonship; - this man who, when he realized the fact that he could do what he had

determined to do only through his assumption of authority and exercise of power which was not less than divine in its range, assumed this authority and began to exercise this power; this man who, when he saw that he must die to succeed, willed to die and to succeed, and to make the cross his throne of universal sovereignty; this man who so believed in himself and his mission and destiny that he appropriated to himself the ancient prophecies, which described him as sitting on the right hand of God and coming in the clouds of heaven; - this man died without in any respect compromising the character he had chosen to assume for himself. If, living, he had confessed that the title Son of God was not too honorable for him, dying, he had not withdrawn or modified the confession. It was therefore by no accident or coincidence that his death marks the central point of the world's history; it is because he willed that it should, and because, whatever name you give to him, he was such a person that what he willed he executed, even to the creation of a new universe.

IX.

THE PRINCE OF LIFE.

AN EASTER SERMON.

That life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.

GAL. ii. 20.

THIS morning our senses have been ravished and our souls enraptured. The fragrance and beauty of these flowers are the creation of nature, or, speaking the language of piety, of God. The more than beauty and fragrance, the nobility and holy incense of that music are the creation of a partnership of God and man. For music, as we know it, is one of the fruits of a rejuvenation of this old world which began when a few despised men proclaimed the incredible story that a certain other man, who had died a disgraceful death, had arisen from the dead. The world was forgetting how to sing; in truth, it never had known how to sing anything but the barest unharmonized ditties of thoughtlessness. But now its spirit was broken, its voice was cracked, it was decrepit, disenchanted, it was depraved and morally impotent, entering

upon a premature and unlovely old age. It was made young, the spirit of childhood and youth reinfused in its shriveled old veins by the triumphant spread of a faith founded upon the alleged resurrection of that one man. Now no longer a mere child, but a man with the healthy heart of a child, the world has learned how to create and to sing such music as antiquity could not dream of. And these two things, the rejuvenation of the world and the faith in the resurrection of that man, belong together as cause and effect.

I see you before me to-day, your faces deeply marked with lines of care, even of anxiety, but it is a loving care and anxiety; it is not despair; I see no lines of malice. Stern purpose I see, but where the purpose is sternest, the marks also of submission are most noticeable. I see you with the countenances of children looking out through fringes of often prematurely whitened hair; and I know, when I stop to consider, that but for the faith in the resurrection of that man, no eye could to-day have looked upon so blessed a sight as the love-suffused face of this audience. The two things belong together as cause and effect. At most times. it would be enough to note this fact, and, assuming the cause, to seek to intensify the effect. Remembering, however, that a faith always assumed may imperceptibly become empty of its content, or shift from its foundation, there are times when it is becoming to consider not merely the effects of the faith, but the faith itself.

We have followed the history of Jesus of Nazareth through the conditions of his origin and childhood, through the struggle which revealed to him. himself and his mission. We saw him try to fulfill the work of the Jewish Messiah, whom he believed himself to be. We saw how he grew to the growing dimensions of his task until, when it appeared to need a man of God-like proportions and God-like consciousness, he became a man of such proportions and consciousness in all that pertained to the requirements of his mission. He was convinced that by no accident, nor yet by any arbitrarily executed decree, but in the fullness of time by the ripening of the race-life, there had come into his hands the destiny of a race so endowed, that the problem of its destiny was one not merely of time but of eternity. He was persuaded that all power in heaven and in earth was given to him. He might save this race if he chose. He might let it be damned. He might save it to faith unconquerable, to hope unfettered, to love unmeasured. He might let it be doomed to universal and mutual mistrust and distrust, to despair blacker than night, and hatred blacker than hell. When he chose

to save the world, he himself showed the first fruits of a love unmeasured, a hope unfettered, and a faith unconquerable. For he must die, as he plainly saw. Yet the salvation of the race was to be his mission, and he would not believe that it should be any less his mission, after he had died