the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the presence of Christ.  Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would necessarily cling to him, the Christian’s mortal eye on earth cannot see Him.  Hedged in by “his muddy vesture of decay,” his eyes, like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith he feels Him.  But death, which till Christ had died had been the last victory of evil, in virtue of His submission to it, became its own destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed away and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of God.

The being who accomplished a work so vast, a work compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling difficulty, what could He be but God?  God Himself!  Who but God could have wrested His prize from a power which half the thinking world believed to be His coequal and coeternal adversary.  He was God.  He was man also, for He was the second Adam—­the second starting point of human growth.  He was virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He showed in the nature of His person, after His resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness.  Here was the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St. Anthony to the tombs—­of the night watches, the weary fasts, the penitential scourgings, and life-long austerities which have been alternately the glory and the reproach of the mediaeval saints.  They would overcome their animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the destruction of the flesh which lay as a veil between themselves and Him.

And such, I believe, to have been the central idea of the beautiful creed which, for 1800 years, has tuned the heart and formed the mind of the noblest of mankind.  From this centre it radiated out and spread, as time went on, into the full circle of human activity, flinging its own philosophy and its own peculiar grace over the common detail of the common life of all of us.  Like the seven lamps before the Throne of God, the seven mighty angels, and the seven stars, the seven sacraments shed over us a never ceasing stream of blessed influence.  First there are the priests, a holy order set apart and endowed with mysterious power, representing Christ and administering his gifts.  Christ, in his twelfth year, was presented in the temple, and first entered on His father’s business; and the baptized child, when it has grown to an age to become conscious of its vow and of its privilege, again renews it in full knowledge of what it undertakes, and receives again