hat had
broken so many hearts and made them whole again; He stretched out His
Shepherd's Hands with which alone He could gather His sheep to His
Breast, and the Feet that alone could bear Him into the wilderness to
_seek after that which was lost_. Was there ever a Suicide such as this,
such a despair of high hopes, such a ruin of all ambition, a dying so
complete and irremediable as the Dying of Jesus Christ?

[Footnote 1: This Sermon was preached on Easter Day.]

And now on Easter Day look at Him again and see how He lives as never
before. See how the Life that has been His for thirty years--the Life of
God made Man--itself pales almost to a phantom before the glory of that
same Life transfigured by Death. Three days ago He fainted beneath the
scourge and nails; now He shows the very scars of His Passion to be the
emblems of immortal strength. Three days ago He spoke in human words to
those only that were near Him, and limited Himself under human terms of
space and time; He speaks now in every heart. Three days ago He gave His
Body to the few who knelt at His Table; to-day in ten thousand
tabernacles that same Body may be worshipped by all who come.

In a word, He has exchanged a Natural Life for a Supernatural in every
plane at once. He has laid down the Natural Life of His Body to take it
back again supernaturalized for ever. He has died that His Life may be
released; He has _finished_ in order to begin.

It is easy, then, to see why it is that the Church _dies daily_, why it
is that she is content to be stripped of all that makes her life
effective, why she too permits her hands to be bound and her feet
fettered and her beauty marred and her voice silenced so far as men can
do those things. She is human? Yes; she dwells in a _body that is
prepared_ for her, but prepared chiefly that she may suffer in it. Her
far-reaching hands are not hers merely that she may bind up with them
the broken-hearted, nor her swift feet hers merely that she may run on
them to succour the perishing, nor her head and heart hers merely that
she may ponder and love. But all this sensitive human organism is hers
that at last she may agonize in it, bleed from it from a thousand
wounds, be lifted up in it to draw all men to her cross.

She does not desire, then, in this world, the _throne of her Father
David_, nor the kind of triumph which is the only kind that the world
understands to be so. She desires one life and one triumph only--the