Arizona republican., 1909-04-12

I
 nal Love Keeping watch above His
 own.
 Easter justifies the high words | of Christ. It reveals to us an en- vironment worthy of the noble spirit of Him who is the resurrection and the life. It makes clear the outlines of the continent of grace. It saves
 us from the pulling fear of death
 revealing beyond the valley the
 heights and the city It feeds and warns the lofty, high-reaching faith
 born in the fellowship of Christ Third-For one sublime, eternal moment, Easter affirms the soul and | justifies our largest faith conce rn-
 ing life. It was not possible tha; He should be holden of it. In these
 words we get, so to speak, the full | length picture of our Lord. That word. revealing to us His esse ntial deathlessness, gives us a hint of the ] majesty and strength and liveliness of Christ, to be found in no other word of scripture. It helps us to feel the meaning of His great word concerning Himself: I am the res urrection and the life. Read in it
 
 i See the meaning of these lives We live, for in Christ, risen and glorious, immortality is brought to light. suppose that we all agree that Eas- ! ter is the great day of the calendar not because then We know that Christ was declared to be the Son of God with power by His resurrec- tion from the dead, but because in that rising from the dead all of our high hopes concerning ourselves, hopes we had scarcely dared to cher ish otherwise, seem sensible and just. The persistence of the personal, how reasonable it seems. We some times try to think what these last nineteen hundred years would have been if Christ had expired on the cross, if He had been conquered by death. We know that then not one of His golden parables would have come down to us; the pictures of the book of Revelation that now live in so many flaming canvases would never have been painted by the seer of Patmos. No John would have risen out of the clay of the son of Zebedee. Paul, who by Christ has made a new geography for the world and for the heart, would have lived and died Saul of Tarsus, nosing a lifetime, perhaps, in the rubbish heap of the past. The Christmas good will and the Easter faith had not been. nor the apostolic success sion of those whose robes have been washed in the blood of the Lamb whose brows have glistened with the light from the eternal hills and whose lives have kept this old world of ours from being swallowed up of hell oh, blessed Spirits, God be thanked for thee! But we cannot think of Christ as being conquered of death; and rising, He makes clear to us the mighty power of person. ality. Now, Christ, having risen, We may see the place of this immortal glory We call man among the orders terrestrial and celestial
 Now We may go back to the mists of the morning and read the first faint tracings of this hope of inn mortality. We may read the rude guesses of Persia and Babylonia, the crass faith of Egypt, the halting faith of Israel and Greece. Now we may go into the laboratory and look into the test-tubes without fear, We have found the clue. We can never be lost again. We may now read the book of our hearts and fathOm the significance of our desire for life, the reach of our affections, the hints of our budding faculties. In mem oriam is no mere poetic fancy It is the song of a rational spirit re- fusing to be held by its chains for ever. Now, see the clouds of glory, which we come into this world trail ing like very denizens of the sky, as Wordsworth has dared to say. Now We may look with joy upon the broken arcs and see the misty future that reaches out beyond a ripe old age, even as the years wind far across space from the gates of youth. and see as Rabbi Ben Ezra saw, that the best is yet to be-"
 My friends, death has always seemed so strong to man and life so frail and unsubstantial. Job said life is only a gust of wind. James says it is but a column of curling blue smoke that quickly fades out the sky. Robertson said that it often seemed only a candles flame. So the poets have lamented from | Homer until now. But today We know better. Easter affirms the | soul. Easter sets forth the eternal | and We see that it is not possible | that He should be holden of death. | We stood off shuddering at the | darkness of the tomb. Jesus went | in and fathomed its meaning and | came out to show us that life can | not be holden of death. Now we ! know what death is. It is but an incident in the long experience of | fife It is a sharp turn in the road | beyond which the way lifts out of | he valley of shadows to the hills | )f God. Now We knew. Now we may read the story of human his .ory and still be of good cheer. These babes who fall asleep shall lwake in the paradise of God. These singers whose throats grow husky | Inder the inclement skies of earth shall sing again otherwheres. These essons we have learned in the school of life we shall use out in iod's great eternal-open when the ,ell has rung for us.
 Thanks be unto Christ, we under 'tand.
 A SWEDISH EARTHQUAKE.
 Copenhagen, April LA violent
 sl.uwH