the midst of our riches and our agitation and our complexity and our artificialness and our slowness of life. Here He stands; and you have come to worship Him this morning. What must it mean, my friends? What must it mean that you rich men have come and bowed down before the poor Jesus Christ? What must it mean that you have come out of your gorgeous houses and have come to kneel and bow down here before Him who had not where to lay His head? Does it mean that your gorgeous houses and your rich luxury is wrong? No, no; but it does mean that you have found in Him something that is greater; unless you go away clear in the sense that He, and that which He represents, is greater, you have lost the lesson of His teaching, you have lost the presence of His life.

When you have come here, you men of complicated and disturbed and complex life, you have come to one to whom life is absolutely simple. You have come to Jesus who knows but one problem and that is sin; who knows but one advantage, and that is holiness. May not your lives grow clearer, so that many things will seem to you of little consequence which have seemed to you of vast importance?

And you have come here, poor men, into the presence of the poor Jesus Christ, to look into the face of the best that divinity in humanity has to show; and, lo! it bears upon its features the unmistakable mark of poverty. You have found

your brother in the poor man Jesus Christ. Shall not some poor man, some poor boy, go back to his life knowing that in poverty there may be every dignity of human life; go back, not simply respecting his property, but respecting the way in which a man may live in his poverty, rejoicing that those things which he has struggled for, which he will still struggle for, are not the necessities of human life? Shall we not, so turning away from the sight of the free Jesus Christ, enter into something which really shall be like His liberty?

But now, while I am occupying you for a few moments, may I not ask you to think something of the way in which Jesus Christ became so free? He became thus free simply because He was for ever tied to, and for ever conscious of, the higher belongings of His life. He remembered that He was the Son of God.

If we can enter into the company of Christ and live there, then our unknown possibilities shall open to us, and in the light of those unknown possibilities we shall be able to despise and to escape from the baser things that cling to us. Do you remember how He went snapping this chain and that chain among the sons of men whom His life touched? Nicodemus came to Him, and the creed-bound Pharisee became the faith-clad man. Christ came to the poor Magdalen, and in her sin He touched her, and she lifted herself up and was free, not only from her sin, but from the tyranny

of her dark remorse, and entered into His service, and by-and-by was with Him at His crucifixion. He came to twelve plain men, plainer than almost any man that is in this house to-day, and touched their lives, and each and every one of those men became that which any one of us would give his life if he could become-one of the Apostles of the new redemption, one of the saviours of the world.

Ah, my friends, it must be a personal following of a personal leader. A creed can never make me believe how wonderful man is, how wonderful I am. It may tell it to me, and the words bound back again from my intelligence on which they strike. A rite or a ceremony can never, in itself, force it any farther than my fingers and my mouth. But the Master, the personal manifestation of it, the Christ who is to-day that which He has been in all the ages, He who walks so humble and so strong, so free because of His absorption, devotion, and consecration to His Father-He brings it to me. And if you will let Him walk with you in your streets, and sit with you in your offices, and be with you in your homes, and teach you in your churches, and abide with you as the Living Presence in your hearts, you, too, shall know what freedom is, and, while you do your duties, be above your duties; and while you live your life, still walk, already walk, in heaven; and, while you own yourselves the sons of men, know that you are the sons of God.

IMMORTALITY.

In that He died, He died unto sin once; but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God.-ROMANS VI. 10.

It is the beauty and the glory of the great festivals of the Christian Church that they bring us into the immediate presence of the most solemn and infinite ideas. It is possible to treat them in a very small and meagre way, as occasions for great assemblies and splendid decorations. But if we get at the heart of them they bring us into the presence of some world-wide, universe-wide ideas, and compel us to face the solemn facts of our existence. It is not that we have forgotten these truths, but that we need to be brought again and again into their spirit. They strike the key-note of our humanity, and make us remember what a large and glorious thing it is to live in our human life. How good it is that Christmas-day and Easter Sunday, and the other great festivals of the Christian year, bring back to us the great truths of our humanity, and we remember that to be children of God is indeed an infinite and glorious privilege.

You have assembled, and multitudes in all our churches have assembled-for what? Let us get

at the very heart and root of it. It is that we may remember that we are immortal. You know the story of the monarch who looked abroad on the multitudes in his armies, and turned away and wept as he reflected that, when a few years should have passed away, not one of those upon whom he was looking would remain in the earth. May we not look abroad on such an assemblage as this gathered here to-day and think with exultation and joy that after ages upon ages shall have passed, every one, the most insignificant as well as the greatest, the greatest as well as the most insignificant, of this assembly here will still be living, going forward in the same identical human career, developing the same humanity, finding the same humanity capable of infinite development, just as we are living here upon this Easter morning? Whatever motive brought you here on this Easter morning, lift up your hearts for a few moments in face of the fact of your immortality and think what it is and what it means that you are to live for ever and for ever.

The world did believe before the first Easter day in immortality and the resurrection from the dead; and yet there came a time when that truth was especially manifested; and that time was the first Easter-day. It is the glory of that day, of the resurrection of Christ, and always has been, that it was the manifestation of the truth which men did believe in their hearts in many loftiest