eadily, the internal is
"real" in a sense in which the external is not: thought has a reality
denied to "things."

The real meaning of Christ's Burial is the mystical meaning, that meaning
which was brought home to the minds of the early Christians by the
picturesque and symbolic ritual of baptism. The man who had, by faith,
accepted Christ as his Lord and Master, was baptised into His Death; that
is, in Him he died to the old life. His submergence beneath the
baptismal waters, the very likeness of the Burial, was the assurance and
the sealing of that death. As truly as the man who is dead and buried is
cut off for ever from the life of this world, so was the baptised
separated, once and for all, from the old heathen life with all its
associations. As clearly did his emergence from those waters show forth
his actual participation in the Lord's Resurrection. He had not merely
left the old life behind, he had from that moment entered upon the new
life, the "life of God"; that is, the life which henceforth had God for
its foundation, its centre, and its goal; the life of moral health and
sanity; the life which was to be, in all its relations, open and clear
and undismayed; the life "in the Light."

1. The first thought, then, of Easter Eve must surely be one of profound
sorrow and humiliation. We ought to be bowed to the very earth with self-
abasement by the thought that we have been, so many times in the past,
untrue to our baptism.

Soldiers of Christ, we have denied our Lord. More, ours has been the
guilt, not of Peter only, but of Judas. Too often we have betrayed Him
for the veriest pittance of this world's good.

We have missed the glory of the Risen Life. All the magnificent language
of the Epistle to the Ephesians, the quickening with Christ, the raising
together with Him from the dead, the enthronement in Him in the heavenly
places--all this was written of Christians in this life. All this might
have been true of us, and is not; for, worse than Esau, we have bartered
away an incomparably more magnificent heritage.

What remains for us to do on this Easter Eve but, with truest penitence,
with utter loathing of self, and utter longing for Him Who is our true
self, to cast ourselves at the Feet of Christ?

2. But the second thought of Easter Eve is one of boundless hope. But
remember, hope can only begin at the Feet of Christ. For Christian hope
has evermore its beginning and its ground in humili