them—­it is not then only that Christ has stood by His servants, and made them more than conquerors:—­there may be something of earthly excitement in all that.  Every day His servants are dying modestly and peacefully—­not a word of victory on their lips; but Christ’s deep triumph in their hearts—­watching the slow progress of their own decay, and yet so far emancipated from personal anxiety that they are still able to think and to plan for others, not knowing that they are doing any great thing.  They die, and the world hears nothing of them; and yet theirs was the completest victory.  They came to the battle field, the field to which they had been looking forward all their lives, and the enemy was not to be found.  There was no Foe to fight with.

The last form in which a Christian gets the victory over death is by means of his resurrection.  It seems to have been this which was chiefly alluded to by the Apostle here; for he says, “when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption ... then shall come to pass the saying which is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.”  And to say the truth, brethren, it is a rhetorical expression rather than a sober truth when we call anything, except the resurrection, victory over death.  We may conquer doubt and fear when we are dying, but that is not conquering death.  It is like a warrior crushed to death by a superior antagonist refusing to yield a groan, and bearing the glance of defiance to the last.  You feel that he is an unconquerable spirit, but he is not the conqueror.  And when you see flesh melting away, and mental power becoming infantine in its feebleness, and lips scarcely able to articulate, is there left one moment a doubt upon the mind, as to who is the conqueror in spite of all the unshaken fortitude there may be?  The victory is on the side of Death, not on the side of the dying.

And my brethren, if we would enter into the full feeling of triumph contained in this verse, we must just try to bear in mind what this world would be without the thought of a resurrection.  If we could conceive an unselfish man looking upon this world of desolation with that infinite compassion which all the brave and good feel, what conception could he have but that of defeat, and failure, and sadness—­the sons of man mounting into a bright existence, and one after another falling back into darkness and nothingness, like soldiers trying to mount an impracticable breach, and falling back crushed and mangled into the ditch before the bayonets and the rattling fire of their conquerors.  Misery and guilt, look which way you will, till the heart gets sick with looking at it.

Brethren, until a man looks on evil till it seems to him almost like a real personal enemy rejoicing over the destruction that it has made, he can scarcely conceive the deep rapture which rushed into the mind of the Apostle Paul when he remembered that a day was coming when all this was to be reversed.