The full reality is yet to be made manifest. Not to us only, but, as Paul says, "also to all them that have loved his appearing." It is to be the great day of the harvest home, the day of Christ's final triumph. Therefore the Church in this closing testimony of the Creed, closely connected, as you will now recognize, with the previous affirmation, "I believe in the forgiveness of sins," by which the resurrection life of the Lord Jesus Christ has come into my sin-sick, smitten soul, says also, "I believe in the resurrection of the body," in which the final and perfect work of forgiveness is realized.'

"Not changed, but glorified! Oh, beauteous language
For those who weep,

Mourning the loss of some dear face departed,
Fallen asleep;

Hushed into silence, never more to comfort
The hearts of men;

Gone, like the sunshine of another country,
Beyond our ken!

"Oh, dearest dead, we saw thy white soul shining
Behind the face,

Bright with the beauty and celestial glory

Of an immortal grace!

What wonder that we stumble, faint and weeping,
And sick with fears,

Since thou hast left us-all alone with sorrow,
And blind with tears!

"Can it be possible no words shall welcome

Our coming feet?

How will it look, that face that we have cherished,
When next we meet?

1 See Notes 11 and 12.

Will it be changed, so glorified and saintly,
That we shall know it not?

Will there be nothing that will say, 'I love thee,
And I have not forgot?'

"Oh, faithless heart, the same loved face, transfigured, Shall meet thee there,

Less sad, less wistful, in immortal beauty

Divinely fair!

The mortal veil, washed pure with many weepings,

Is rent away,

And the great soul that sat within its prison
Hath found the day.

"In the clear morning of that other country,

In Paradise,

With the same face that we have loved and cherished

She shall arise!

Let us be patient, we who mourn, with weeping,
Some vanished face,

The Lord has taken but to add more beauty
And a diviner grace.

“And we shall find once more, beyond earth's sorrows, Beyond these skies,

In the fair city of the "sure foundations,"

Those heavenly eyes,

With the same welcome shining through their sweetness That met us here

Eyes, from whose beauty God has banished weeping And wiped away the tear."

XVI

THE AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE

"And the Life Everlasting "

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to his great mercy begat us again unto a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, unto an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away, reserved in heaven for you, who by the power of God are guarded through faith unto a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time."

1 PETER 1: 3-5.

CHAPTER XVI

THE AFFIRMATION OF ETERNAL LIFE

The Creed begins with the affirmation of faith in God from whom we come; it closes with the affirmation of faith in the everlasting life to which we hope to go. It presents that life as established in God, and as the final result to which the whole redemptive work of God is directed. There is that in our hearts which declares that anything short of this would be failure. We come from God, and we are made to go to him again.

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar.

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home."

We readily believe, with Wordsworth, as he gazed at the little girl with her ignorance of the meaning of death, that

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy;"

but with our advancing manhood we want something firmer than the Intimations of Immortality in the