e was visible, He was invisible. He was in
the midst of his disciples and they saw Him, and then he was gone
whither who could tell? At last He passed away to heaven; but while in
heaven, He was still on earth. His body became the body of his Church on
earth, not in metaphor, but in fact!--his very material body, in which
and by which the faithful would be saved. His flesh and blood were
thenceforth to be their food. They were to eat it as they would eat
ordinary meat. They were to take it into their system, a pure material
substance, to leaven the old natural substance and assimilate it to
itself. As they fed upon it it would grow into them, and it would become
their own real body. Flesh grown in the old way was the body of death,
but the flesh of Christ was the life of the world, over which death had
no power. Circumcision availed nothing, nor uncircumcision--but a _new
creature_--and this new creature, which the child first put on in
baptism, was born again into Christ of water and the Spirit. In the
Eucharist he was fed and sustained, and went on from strength to
strength; and ever as the nature of his body changed, being able to
render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass away to God
through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the
presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but
because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would
necessarily cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth
could not see Him. Hedged in by 'his muddy vesture of decay,' his eyes,
like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith
he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last
victory of evil, in virtue of his submission to it, became its own
destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old
substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed
away, and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in
immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of God.

The being who accomplished a work so vast--a work compared to which the
first creation appears but a trifling difficulty--what could He be but
God? God Himself! Who but God could have wrested his prize from a power
which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal and coeternal
adversary? He was God. He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the
second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no