The Newtown bee., 1897-04-30

Mary, Joanna, Salome and other Galilean women joined her, themselves bringing spices to the grave; and the angel spoke to the women and said: s'He is not here i: for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay" The golden dawn of a new and glorious day spread kindling over the heavens: new day, for new thoughts, new hopes, new life were now born into the world; glorious day, for the event of that day transforms the world, and makes it no more the abode of despair, but training school for joys in- ettable and glory inconceivable. All hail the dawn of that day The love of the women was rewarded. Love that could not sit still came to it's happy end. It sought dead Christ; it found risen Redeemer.
 Let us look at this message of the Eas- ter angel: "He is not here; for He is ris- en, as He said" ''As He said," you would not catch the significance of those words unless you gave them careful study. Christ's resurrection is a great strengthener of our faith in Him: it proves that He is "the Life, the Truth, the Way" The fact of the resurrection proves that His words are yea and nay, the very essence of truth. This is the case, let us get it clearly: Christ so fre- quently and so clearly before His death told that He would rige, that when He did rise the stamp of truth was placed upon ! all that He said with ineffaceable mark but If He had not risen, when He had so often and so positively declared that He would rise, then He would stand convic- ted as an impostor and fraud, and none of l the things which He sad would have about them the ring of truth. If Christ 1 rose, He is the Truth; if He did not rise, He is false on every side. If you deny the credibility of that which happened in the dawn of that first Easter day, then you, by logical sequence, admit that Christ was no better than any other o1 the false Christs that appeared in Judma, l and their name is legion. We are apt tC think that the fact of Christ's resurrec, tion depends chiefly upon the witness of the Apostles our text hints that it depends chiefly up. on the witness of Christ Himself. His whole cause hangs about this fact. If it goes, Christ goes. If we brush Christ's resurrection aside, we brush aside His | birth and life and death. These, with out the resurrection, mean nothing; they are baubles light as air.
 ''As He said." Christ so many times and so publicly, before His death, said that He would rise that His enemies used His statements as an argument with Pi. late, so that the sepulchTe might be made sure. They came to Pilate on the day following the cruciixion and said ''Sir,
 we remember that that deceiver said,
 while he was yet alive, After three days will rise again. Command, therefore, that the sepulchre be made sure until the third day Jest his disciples come by night and steal him away and say unto the peo- 1 pie, He is risen from the dead: so the last error shall be worse than the frst.' AGAIN AND AGAIN DURING HIS LIFE
 Jesus said that He had power to lay down His life and He had power to take it again, When certain of the scribes and of the Pharisees asked sign from Jesus, He said he had no sign to give them but that of the prophet Jonas, who was three days and three nights in the whales belly even as the Son of man should be three days and three nights | in the heart of the earth. If you ever have given close study to the Gospel of Matthew, you have noticed how clearly it is divided into these distinct parts, the ministry of Christ's life and the path that led to His death. This path to Cal vary begins in the Gospel at the 16th chapter and the 2lst verse, at time when Jesus is in far-away Cmsarea Philippi, just after the splendid testi. ] mony of Peter to Ckrist's divinity. At this point the Gospel reads: From that u me forth began Je,us to show unto His diselples, how taaL He must go unto Je- rusalem and suffer many things of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised again the third day." As He gets nearer to Jerusalem, at Capernaum, Christ again announces