TO THE POET. To write, O heart! it is a solemn thing, Perchance the agèd shall peruse thy book, What hast thou, Bard, for them? shall years have taught That thou hast sung thy dreams, and named them Truth, Or shall they find thy soul was strong, and still Submissive leaned upon thy Father's will, Nor swerved from Right by public blame or praise, Eternal pulsing in the life of man? Yea, shall they find that o'er the chill, the gloom, Thy vision pierces, manifesting there The walls and bulwarks of a city fair, Love-lit and peace-encircled and secure Reserved for sons of earth, the true, the pure? Ah, Poet, question thou thy soul and see What harvest waits thy cherished songs and thee, Thy harp has still been true, and ne'er betrayed William R. Wood. "I have seen Him and touched Him; He has broken the prison. It is life, it is light, The Christ has arisen!" Then shall we turn away from the sepulchre of buried hopes, lost opportunities, unfulfilled ambitions, unsatisfied heart hunger, bitter memories, lost friendships; yes, from the graves of our best-beloved. to make others glad with the good news, "He is risen! When our hearts recognize the voice of Jesus, gladness dispels the gloom; the tomb where, with blinded eyes and faith eclipsed, we poured out our tears, becomes the gateway to life; our grief, the avenue to richer joy; the light affliction, a factor in the eternal weight of glory. May this be indeed our Easter joy, "to know Him and the power of his resurrection;" to know His love in saving the world, not with a knowledge superficial, but broad and deep in its comprehension of the great love wherewith He loved us. Nothing else will so stimulate our gratitude, create so holy an ambition to be and do our best, so inspire our efforts to be true and self-denying for love s sake. Phillips Brooks, who has entered into "life in its completeness," said, “Oh ! if we could only lift up our hearts and live with Him; live new lives, high lives,lives of hope and love and holines, to which death should be nothing but the breaking away of the last cloud, and the letting of the life out to its completion.' May God give us some such blessing for our Easter Day! "May all our votive hearts be alabasters white Which, breaking to our Lord, in consecration's rite We gladly give. Their perfume shall be hope, this hour, And faith, which end in deed-love's perfect-petaled flower." -From Watch Tower. THE EASTER SYMBOL. "Consider the lilies of the field." We must take our Lord's words exactly. He is speaking of the lilies, of the bulbous plants which spring into flower in countless thousands every spring over the downs of Eastern lands. All the winter they are dead, unsightly roots hidden in the earth. But no sooner does the sun of spring shine upon their graves than they rise into sudden life and beauty, as ases God, and every seed takes its liar body. Sown in corruption, aised in incorruption; sown in weakness, they are raised in power; sown in dishonour, they are raised in glory-delicate, beautiful in colour, perfuming the air with fragrance, types of immortality fit for the crowns of angels. "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow." For even so is the resurrection of the dead. Yes, not without divine providence, yea, a divine inspiration, has Easter-tide been fixed as the season when the earth shakes off her winter's sleep, when the birds come back and the flowers begin to bloom, when every seed which falls into the ground and dies and rises again with a new body is a witness to us of the Resurrection of Christ, and a witness, too, that we shall rise again; that in us, as in it, life shall conquer death; when every bird that comes back to sing and build among us, every flower that blows, is a witness to us of the Resurrection of the Lord and of our resurrection. - Charles Kingsley. EASTER PROMISE AND PRIVILEGE. The key-note of Easter is life and joy and hope. Fear not." said the angel of the resurrection. A Christian has no business to be other than cheerful and fearless. He belongs to a conquering race. He is a disciple of One who never lost a battle. He has no reason to fear anything or anybody, not even God Himself in any servile sense, for God has become his friend. Still less does he fear the censure or the anger of man, for in the discharge of his duty he is invincible. And death has no terrors for him, since Christ 80 completely overcame that "Arch-Fear" that He is truly said to have "abolished" it. How greatly this sad world needs just such a note of cheer! Let it ring out strong and clear on the April air. Jesus said, "I have overcome. And in Him we, too, prevail. We overcome the world, so that its ideals, its ambitions, its alarms, have no influ nce over us, no power to detach us from the right or turn us a hair's-breadth from the course. We live in a higher atmosphere than the world supplies, and are not interested in the objects it pursues. We overcome the flesh. Its pleadings for indulgence we promptly trample down when they run counter to the call divine. We overcome the devil. Baffled and discomfited, he flees as the believer opposes to his darts the shield of faith, and wields the Spirit's sword The resurrection gives loudest possible testimony to Jesus as the Conqueror of death and hell, and of all that those grim words denote. If our trust is in Him, then indubitable is our right to all the rich comfort which comes from the fullest acceptance of the angel message, "Fear not. But let us not forget, in the midst of our Easter joy, that this is only half the message. The other half was, "Go quickly and tell." Here is the aspect of duty which always lies close alongside that of privilege. It is not enough to receive. What can we do for Him who has brought to light for us life and immortality? We can run and proclaim the good news, as did those first ones to whom the tidings came. The new-found joy is too good and great to keep to ourselves. If we try to do so, it will surely be the worse for us. Silence is a betrayal of our trust. We must "tell it out among the nations that the Saviour reigns." Oh, blessed work! Oh, labour that lay nearest to the Saviour's heart, forever linked with the day of His resurrection and His going up on high! We best celebrate the day as we dedicate ourselves anew to the prosecution of this glorious task, counting no sacrifice too great that the kingdom may go steadily forward, and the world be lifted a little higher out of darkness into light.-Rev. James Mudge, D.D. logical, or even on psychical grounds, that this human nature of ours is probably an indestructible thing, and that the chances are strongly in favour of our survival of the crisis known as death-you have not succeeded in giving me so very much comfort, after all. We want to have revealed to us, not merely the hard fact that another life there is, we want also to have revealed to us what I have called the atmosphere of the fact. We want to know just that very thing which the risen Christ's word to Mary, and word to Thomas, and word to Simon Peter tell us, and which no amount of ingenious dissertation upon the indestructibility of matter and the persistency of force can so much as begin to convey. For we are human, and a man's heart has been given to us, and I confess to a good deal of sympathy with the poet who blurts out his dissatisfaction with such theories as insist upon our being 66 'Only cunning cast in clay : Let science prove we are, and then At least to me? I would not stay." There is a certain fine scorn about that which is rather creditable than otherwise to the scorner. So we come back to the triumph song with which we started, well assured by what we have seen and heard that the facts warrant us in raising it. "Thanks be to God which giveth us the victory." How? By weapons forged in the armoury of our own thought? No, not so, not so at all, but "through our Lord Jesus Christ," who, having Himself, in His own Person, won the battle, has been able to make us sharers in the fruits of victory. AN EASTER HYMN. I have no gift of fragrant spice, No gems for thine adorning; But empty, asking hands I bring, To greet thine Easter morning. Here humbly to Thy feet, dear Lord, Low in the sepulchre of doubt My soul is prostrate sleeping, And worldly pride and worldly care Their sentinel watch are keeping. Help, Lord! All human aid is vain! My faith is fainting, dying! Roll back the stone of unbelief He hears my prayer, He heeds my cry, "Touch thou the nail-prints in these hands O, here is no deceiving! Of peace and joy, of hope and heaven, -Fannie M. McCauley. |