The Bossier banner. [volume] (Bellevue, Bossier Parish, La.) 1859-1952, 1890-07-17

olive trees that shaded the mounJS
higher, until He 10 within sight of the
Bethlehem where He was born, and the
Jordan where He was baptized, and the
Golgotha where He was slain; higher,
until on stairs of feecY cloud He steps;
higher, until into a sky bluer than the
lake that could not sink Him He disap-
pears into sea of glory whose billow-
ing splendors hide Him. The fisher
men watch and watch, wondering if the
law of nature will not reassert itself,
and He shall in a few moments come
back again, and they shall see
Him descending; first His Scared
feet coming in sight, then the
SCARED side, then the scared brow, and
they may take again His SCARED hand.
But the moments pass by, and the
hours, and no temperance. Gone out
of sight of earth, but come within sight
of Heaven. And rising still, not well
coined by one angelic choir like those
who one Christmas night escorted Him
down, but all Heaven turns out to greet
Him home, and the temples have espe-
cial anthem, and the palaces have espe-
cial banquet, and the streets especial
throngs; and all along the line to the
foot of the throne, for years vacated
but now again to be taken, there are
arches lifted, and banners waved, and
trumpets sounded, and doxologies chant
ed, and coronets cast Gown.
The angels throng'd His chariot wheels,
And bore Him to His throne;
Then swept their golden harps and sung,
"The glorious work is DONE"
1t was tho greatest day in Heaven!
As He goes up the steps of the throne
that thirty-three years before He abb
dictated for our advantage, there rises
from all the hosts of Heaven a shout,
sanity, cherubic, seraphic, archangelic,
"Hallelujah! Amen!p
o garden of olives, thou dear honored spot,
The fame of Thy glory shall meier be forgot.
No wonder that for at least fourteen
hundred years the churches have, forty
days after Easter, kept Ascension Day,
for the lessons are most inspiring and
glorious. 1t takes much of the uncer-
tainty out of the idea of Heaven, when
from Olivet we see human nature as
cending. The same body that rose
from Joseph's tomb assembled from
Mount Olivet. Our human nature is in
Heaven to-day. Just as they had seen
Christ for forty days, He assembled,
head, face, shoulders, hands, feet
and the entire human organism.
Humanity assembled! All, how close
ly that keeps Christ in sympathy
with those who are still in the struggled!
Assembled scars, face scars, hand scars,
feet scars, shoulder scars! That will
keep Him in accord with the suffering,
with all the imposed upon. No more is
He spirit now than body, no more of
Heaven than earth. Those of the
celestial inhabitants who never saw our
world, now walk around Him and learn
from His physical contour something of
what our race will be when, in the res
direction, Heaven will have uncounted
spirits. On Ascension Day He lifted
Himself through the atmosphere of
Palestine until, amid the immensities,
He disappeared. He was the only be-
ing the world ever saw who could lift
Himself. Surely, if He could lift Him
self, He can do the lesser deed of lift
ing US.
| No star goes down but climbs another sky,
No sun sets here except to rise on high.
Christ broke botanical law when, one
Monday in March, on the way from
Bethany to Jerusalem, by few words
He turned a full-leaved fig tree into a
lifeless stick. He broke ichthyological
law when, without any natural induce.
ment, He swung great school of fish
into part of Lake Tiberias, where
the fishermen had cast their nets fol-
eight or ten hours without the capture
of minnow; and by making a fish heir
pay the tax by yielding from its mouth
a Roman slater. Christ broke the law
of storms by compelling, with a word,
the angered sea hush its frenzy, and the
winds to quit their believing. He
broke geological law when He made the
devils possess the swine of Gadara. He
broke the law of economics when He
made enough bread for five thousand
people out of five biscuits that would
not ordinarily have been enough fol
ten of the hungry. He broke intellect.
ual law when, by word, He silenced a
maniac into placidity. He broke physi.
illogical law, when, by a touch, He
Strengthened woman who, for eighteen
years, had been bent almost double, and
when He put spring into the foot of in.
humated Lazarus, and when, without
medicine, He gave the dying girl back
in health to the Syro-Phenician moth.
er, and when He made the palatial home
of the nobleman resound again with the
laughter of his restored boy, and when,
without knife or battery, He set cata.
racted eyes to seeing again, and the
drum of deaf ears to vibrating again,
and the nerves of paralyzed arms tc
thrilling again, and then, when in leav,
ing the earth, He defed all atmospheric
law, and physiological law, and thai
law that has in it withes and cables
and girders enough to hold the universe,
the law of gravitation.
The Christ who proved Himself on So
many occasions, and especially the last
superior to law. still lives; and every
day, in answer to prayer for the good Of
the world, He is overriding the law.
Blessed be God that we are not the sub
| iectS of blind fataIitv hp+ of +, c,-,,