eath
has no power. Above all, when we unselfishly love one in whom dwells
moral nobility,--when it is a great and vital and holy nature to which we
join ourselves,--there comes to us a profound and pregnant sense of its
immortality. It is when death's stroke has fallen that that sense rises
into full, triumphant bloom.

No wonder the disciples felt that their Master lived! Theirs was the
experience that in substance repeats itself whenever from among those who
love it a noble soul goes home. It was because Jesus was supremely
noble, and they had loved him with consummate affection, that their
experience was so intense and vivid. Its true significance lay in this,
that it was not supernatural but natural. It is standing the pyramid on
its apex to deduce all human goodness from the goodness of Jesus, and to
argue a universal immortality solely from his rising. Let us place the
pyramid four-square in the universal truth of human nature. Let us
ground our religion upon the moral fidelity, the human love, the
spiritual aspiration, and the sober regard for fact, in which all loyal
souls can agree. Then at its summit we shall get that character of which
Jesus is the type, a character in which self-sacrifice and joy divinely
blend, and which in its passage from earth imparts the irresistible
assurance of a higher life beyond.

This morning the sun rose upon earth and trees encased in blazing jewelry
of ice. Fast, fast the beauty melted and was gone,--and in its place,
behold the brown earth touched with living green and teeming with
promise; the trees' strong limbs tipped with swelling buds; and over all
the tender, brooding sky of spring. Even so, the pageant of the
miracle-story dissolves, to give place to the natural consciousness of
eternal beauty and eternal life.

A group of Americans meet in a foreign city, and they talk fondly of
home, and to each of them home has its special meaning. One says: "I
remember the green hill-pastures and the great elms and the white
farmhouses; I know just how the autumn woods are looking, and the stocked
corn, and the pumpkins ripening in the sun; and I am homesick for a sight
of it all." Another says: "It is the nation that I think of. To me
America seems the home of the poor man, the common man. She is working
out great and difficult questions in government and society, and I have
strong faith that the outcome of it all is going to be a great good to
the world. I long