rrier that will resist that force, and only one, and that is
the historical facts that Jesus Christ died, and that Jesus Christ
has risen again. He rose; therefore death is not the end of
individual existence. He rose; therefore life beyond the grave is
possible for humanity. He rose; therefore His sacrifice for the
world's sin is accepted, and I may be delivered from my guilt and my
burden. He rose; therefore He is declared to be the Son of God with
power. He rose; therefore we, if we trust Him, may partake in His
Resurrection and in some reflection of His glory. The old Greek
architects were often careless of the solidity of the soil on which
they built their temples, and so, many of them have fallen in ruins.
The Temple of Immortality can be built only upon the rock of that
proclamation--Jesus Christ is risen from the dead. And we, dear
brethren, should have all our hopes founded upon that one fact.

So then, for us, the calm, peaceful passage from life into what else
is the great darkness is possible on condition of our having beheld
the risen Lord. These witnesses of whom my text speaks, Paul would
suggest to us, laid themselves quietly down to sleep, because before
them there still hovered the memory of the vision which they had
beheld. Faith in the risen Christ is the anchor of the soul in death,
and there is nothing else by which we can hold then.

As the same Apostle, in one of his other letters, puts it, the belief
that Christ is risen is not only the irrefragable ground of our hope
that we, too, shall rise, but has the power to change the whole
aspect of our death. Did you ever observe the emphasis with which He
says, 'If we believe that Jesus _died_ and rose again, even so
them also which _sleep_ in Jesus will God bring with Him?' His
death was death indeed, and faith in it softens ours to sleep. He
bore the reality that we might never need to know it, and if our poor
hearts are resting upon that dear Lord, then the flames are but
painted ones and will not burn, and we shall pass through them, and
no smell of fire will be upon us, and all that will be consumed will
be the bonds which bind us. He has abolished death. The physical fact
remains, but all which to men makes the idea of death is gone if we
trust the risen Lord. So that, between two men dying under precisely
the same circumstances, of the same disease, in adjacent beds in the
same hospital, there may be such a difference as that the same word
can