SERMON X.

THE ETERNAL LIFE OF CHRIST IN HEAVEN".

PREACHED IN THE CHAPEL ROYAL, DUBLIN CASTLE, ON ADVENT SUNDAY, 1842.

IT

REVELATIONS, i. 8.

Behold, I am alive for evermore.

T is Christ the Son of God who speaks these words. It is He who is "the Faithful Witness and the First Begotten of the Dead," that thus declares His own triumph, and ours in His, after that, passing the grave and gate of death, He has reached his destined world of immortality. From thence, looking back once more with pitying love into the scene of His trials, He utters a voice strange and mysterious, a voice already solemnized to the tone of that invisible world upon which He has entered, a voice deep with the echoes of eternity, hard to catch or comprehend, as though it were a fragment of that " new song which no man can learn but they that are re

deemed from the earth."

This, indeed, is one of the characteristics that confer a peculiar interest on the Book of the Revelation. Christ speaks, it is true, by His Spirit in all Scripture; but here, for the first time after His ascension to glory, if we set aside those brief addresses to St. Paul, we have Him speaking in His own person to the mortal followers He left behind Him. The veil of heaven is undrawn; He is alone with His beloved as of old. But a

This sermon was first printed in "Sermons for Sundays, Festivals, and Fasts, and other Liturgical Occasions." Edited by the Rev. Alexander Watson, Curate of St. John's, Cheltenham. Masters: London.

change has passed over Him since the times of Capernaum and Bethany. He has selected for the interview that dear associate who was wont to recline in His bosom; but now "the disciple whom Jesus loved," trembling and overpowered, "falls at his feet as dead." The Man of Sorrows now flashes insufferable brightness from eyes which are "as a flame of fire,”"His feet are like unto fine brass as if they burned in a furnace, and His voice as the sound of many waters. He hath in His right hand seven stars, out of His mouth goeth a sharp two-edged sword, and His countenance is as the sun shineth in his strength." The change of language is not less wonderful than the change of appearance. St. John, in his Gospel record, loves to transcribe the tenderest expressions and actions of his Lord; St. John, in his Apocalypse, is all majesty, ecstacy, reverence, and awe. It was once, "little children ! yet a little time and I am with you;" it is now," I am the First and the Last,-He that liveth and was dead, and behold, I am alive for evermore !"

Yet notwithstanding all this pomp of celestial grandeur, how remarkable is the minuteness of anxiety which the messages of this wonderful Being manifest; how little is forgotten or overlooked in His vigilant and capacious survey! He is represented as walking in the midst of seven golden lamps which are Churches, to typify His indwelling presence and pervading care; and each Church is warned with a precision and particularity, that evince how impossible it is to evade His scrutiny, or defeat His purposes of retribution. The joys of the heavenly world have not distracted His attention from His earthly charge. Special heresies, false and unauthorized teachers, lack of discipline, growing neglect,-all are noted and admonished; even as we cannot doubt that, at this hour, yea, in this very house of prayer, the same invisible Censor is awfully present amongst us, noting our state as a Church, and our deeds as its individual members. What his present relations may be to other worlds-to the vast universe of worlds that spreads around us through the infinitude of space-we know not, nor can conjecture; but we do know that His relation to us is as intimate

and incessant as if no other object existed to occupy His thoughts. In His highest glory we are all personally interested; for it is the representative and champion of our race that is thus glorified; in Him we are virtually enthroned," kings and priests unto God and His Father." Yea, even now the more the parties sever, the closer the knot is bound. In the passage before us, the very majesty of His celestial state, far from forming a ground of separation, seems made the ground of consolation and confidence to His poor disciples; when St. John sank in lifeless terror before the apparition of His glorified Master, the divine visitant did not abridge the splendours of His presence, but gave the disciple strength to endure them: to allay the shrinking Apostle's fears, He did not (as we might, perhaps, expect) speak of past humiliation, but of present glory. He did not diminish, but assert, the full magnificence of His claims, and fixed them as the basis of a high and holy trust:"Fear not! I am the First and the Last!"

But all His powers and privileges of being our eternal governor, guide, and friend, are founded in the great declaration of the text: "I am He that liveth and was dead; and behold, I am alive for evermore!

At this holy season we profess more specially to discipline our hearts and minds for His coming. Is it not well, then, that we consider the purposes of His present glorious life in Heaven, no less than of His former lowly life on earth; is it not well that, "in the Spirit on the Lord's Day," we should endeavour to rise to the grandeur of His actual authority in Heaven, in order that we may, however feebly, learn to estimate what is indeed that state from which He is to come among us, and of which He is, by that last triumphant Advent, to make us the everlasting partakers?

You will not think it prolix or uninteresting, if I go back to the ideas that lie at the foundation of the subject, in order to bring you gradually to conceive it.

The great features of the Christian Revelation are familiar to us all. Facts are delivered to us in the New Testament, and their reasons sufficiently assigned to enable us to collect from

the page of Scripture these mysterious truths: that whereas a Being exists through eternity as the sole Cause and Author of all, it became necessary, in order to His purposes, that this Being should in some inconceivable way descend into the limitations of the world of time, that He should unite Himself specially with humanity, should thenceforward be inseparably associated with it, and should, in virtue of that association, be empowered to carry a portion of its possessors, by Him duly gifted for the purpose, through all the glorious fortunes of His own human immortality.

Now if any man ask me to account for these facts, to reduce them to any known principles, to show how they are necessarily bound up with the facts and principles of our own daily experience, I candidly confess that I can go but little way in any such speculation. Gleams of light may here and there be caught by persevering reason, but they are only gleams; "since the world began was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind;" and till natural reason expands into supernatural vision, we must still be content to "walk by faith and not by sight." These facts of the Scripture story concern death and life, misery and blessedness, and perhaps if we knew the full nature of these-in what it is they consist-we might be able to see how Christ's marvellous interference is necessarily connected with them; but of these, though we see much, we know little or nothing. The course of nature-and of that better nature which we term grace-being the outward manifestation of the secret laws of God, revolves around us like some vast and various panorama; we can see the mutual relations of the objects, mark their positions and their recurrences; but the grounds and reasons of the whole, the mind of the artist, the disposition of the mechanism, this passes the eye, this lies deeper than the visible surface, and to those who cannot move from their appointed post, who can only see, not touch or handle, it is, and it must remain, inscrutable.

However, the case is less hopeless, when, instead of attempting to scrutinize the last reasons of these sublime dispensations, we endeavour to observe and methodize what Revelation has declared concerning them. In this point of view, we can per

ceive that Christ, who "liveth for evermore," is set forth in two great characters, in both of which His eternal life in glory is momentous to our interests.

In every theology the world has ever known or imagined, it has been in some form or other acknowledged, that there is carried on in this world a conflict between opposite principles of good and evil. To all who admit that the visible world is under any invisible control, this truth is so manifest that it has forced itself upon every observer, and become embodied in every religious system. The most general, though figurative, enunciation of this truth is to be found in those theories, spread through nearly all oriental countries, which speak of a warfare between light and darkness; a phraseology employed in inspired Scripture, and thence, probably, in ancient times, borrowed, exaggerated, and travestied by pagan and heretical teachers. However represented, however distorted, the fact is certain; we feel it within us, around us, above us, beneath us; every department of nature, by turns, is seen or felt to be a part of the vast battle-field, on which incessantly rages a contest, to which reason is perplexed in attempting to assign either beginning or termination.

Now, when through the intricacy of the engagement we endeavour to penetrate to the parties engaged, we cannot hesitate to perceive that the powers of evil consist of two great detachments, which speculative men have called physical and moral evil, which plain people are familiar with under the titles of pain and guilt,—pain, which seems naturally to tend to weakness and death; and guilt, which by a process as natural, descends into habitual and irremediable sin. Distinct as are these two forms of evil, even in our own experience we detect traces of a connexion between them; but it is to Revelation that we are indebted for the clearest intimation of their secret but indissoluble association; to Revelation, which announces that physical infirmity and death entered our human creation in the footsteps of wilful sin, that wilful sin is the forerunner of pains eternal.

To these powers, then, the two great engines of the Adversary, Christ is revealed as the counteracting agent. He came