all, it is a triumph so common as scarcely to deserve the name.  Felons die on the scaffold like men; soldiers can be hired by tens of thousands, for a few pence a day, to front death in its worst form.  Every minute that we live sixty of the human race are passing away, and the greater part with courage—­the weak, and the timid, as well as the resolute.  Courage is a very different thing from the Christian’s victory.

Once more brethren, necessity can make man conqueror over death.  We can make up our minds to anything when it once becomes inevitable.  It is the agony of suspense that makes danger dreadful.  History can tell us that men can look with desperate calmness upon hell itself when once it has become a certainty.  And it is this after all, that commonly makes the dying hour so quiet a thing.  It is more dreadful in the distance than in the reality.  When a man feels that there is no help, and he must go, he lays him down to die, as quietly as a tired traveller wraps himself in his cloak to sleep.  It is quite another thing from all this that Paul meant by victory.

In the first place, it is the prerogative of a Christian to be conqueror over Doubt.  Brethren, do we all know what doubt means?  Perchance not.  There are some men who have never believed enough to doubt.  There are some who have never thrown their hopes with such earnestness on the world to come, as to feel anxiety for fear it should not all be true.  But every one who knows what Faith is, knows too, what is the desolation of Doubt.  We pray till we begin to ask, Is there one who hears, or am I whispering to myself?—­We hear the consolation administered to the bereaved, and we see the coffin lowered into the grave, and the thought comes, What if all this doctrine of a life to come be but the dream of man’s imaginative mind, carried on from age to age, and so believed, because it is a venerable superstition?  Mow Christ gives us victory over that terrible suspicion in two ways—­first, He does it by His own resurrection.  We have got a fact there that all the metaphysics about impossibility cannot rob us of.  In moments of perplexity we look back to this.  The grave has once, and more than once, at the Redeemer’s bidding, given up its dead.  It is a world fact.  It tells us what the Bible means by our resurrection—­not a spiritual rising into new holiness merely—­that, but also something more.  It means that in our own proper identity, we shall live again.  Make that thought real, and God has given you, so far, victory over the grave through Christ.

There is another way in which we get the victory over doubt, and that is by living in Christ.  All doubt comes from living out of habits of affectionate obedience to God.  By idleness, by neglected prayer, we lose our power of realizing things not seen.  Let a man be religious and irreligious at intervals—­irregular, inconsistent, without some distinct thing to live