enough to
doubt. There are some who have never thrown their hopes with such
earnestness on the world to come, as to feel anxiety for fear it
should not all be true. But every one who knows what Faith is, knows
too, what is the desolation of Doubt. We pray till we begin to ask, Is
there one who hears, or am I whispering to myself?--We hear the
consolation administered to the bereaved, and we see the coffin
lowered into the grave, and the thought comes, What if all this
doctrine of a life to come be but the dream of man's imaginative mind,
carried on from age to age, and so believed, because it is a venerable
superstition? Mow Christ gives us victory over that terrible suspicion
in two ways--first, He does it by His own resurrection. We have got a
fact there that all the metaphysics about impossibility cannot rob us
of. In moments of perplexity we look back to this. The grave has once,
and more than once, at the Redeemer's bidding, given up its dead. It
is a world fact. It tells us what the Bible means by our
resurrection--not a spiritual rising into new holiness merely--that,
but also something more. It means that in our own proper identity, we
shall live again. Make that thought real, and God has given you, so
far, victory over the grave through Christ.

There is another way in which we get the victory over doubt, and that
is by living in Christ. All doubt comes from living out of habits of
affectionate obedience to God. By idleness, by neglected prayer, we
lose our power of realizing things not seen. Let a man be religious
and irreligious at intervals--irregular, inconsistent, without some
distinct thing to live for--it is a matter of impossibility that he
can be free from doubts. He must make up his mind for a dark life.
Doubts can only be dispelled by that kind of active life that realizes
Christ. And there is no faith that gives a victory so steadily
triumphant as that. When such a man comes near the opening of the
vault, it is no world of sorrows he is entering upon. He is only going
to see things that he has felt, for he has been living in heaven. He
has his grasp on things that other men are only groping after and
touching now and then. Live above this world, Brethren, and then the
powers of the world to come are so upon you that there is no room for
doubt.

Besides all this, it is a Christian's privilege to have victory over
the fear of death. And here it is exceedingly eas