cclesiastes--"For that is the end of all men"!

Oh, spring up brighter in all our hearts, thou divinely given, divinely
sustained Hope!

_Fourth_.--"For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a
shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and
the dead in Christ shall rise first."

Another sweet and holy word of comfort. We have seen Jesus putting His
saints to sleep, as to their bodies; and here we see the same Lord
Jesus Himself bidding them rise. No indiscriminate general
resurrection this: "the dead in Christ" alone are concerned: they rise
first. He who died for them knows them; and they, too, have known His
voice in life: that same voice now awakens them, and bids them rise as
easily as the little damsel at the "Talitha Cumi"! How precious is
this glorious word of the Lord! How perfect the order! No
awe-inspiring trumpet, "sounding long and waxing loud," as at Sinai of
old, awakening the panic-stricken dead, and bidding them come to an
awful judgment. Such the picture that man's dark unbelief and guilty
conscience have drawn. Small comfort would we have for mourners were
that true. God be thanked it is not. Their Saviour's well-known voice
that our dead have loved shall awaken them, ringing full and true in
every tone and note of it with the love He has borne them. Then the
voice of the Archangel Michael, the great marshal of God's victorious
hosts shall range our ranks. This accomplished, and all in the perfect
divine order of victory, the trumpet shall sound and the redeemed shall
begin their triumphant, blissful, upward flight.

_Fifth_.--But the Spirit of God desires us to get and to give the
comfort of another precious word. In no strange unknown company shall
we who are alive and remain start on that homeward journey, but
"together with them." Who that has known the agony of broken
heart-strings does not see the infinitely gracious tender comfort in
those three words, "together with them"? There is reunion. Once more
we shall be in very deed with those we love, with never a thought or
fear of parting more to shadow the mutual joy. In view of those three
words it were simple impertinence to question whether we shall
recognize our dear saints who have preceded us. Not only would such a
question rob them of their beauty, but of their very meaning. They
would be empty and absolutely meaningless in such case. Sure, beyond a
peradventure, is it that our most ch