dared wholly to believe it till He showed them that it was true. And now if we believe in Him, we do believe it, and death is really changed to us, and the dead are really living by the assurance of the living Christ. It is a beautiful connection, one whose mysterious beauty we are always learning more and more, that the deeper our spiritual experience of Christ becomes, the more our soul's life really hangs on His life as its savior and continual friend, the more real becomes to us the unquenched life of those who have gone from us to be with Him. In those moments when Christ is most real to me, when He lives in the centre of my desires and I am resting most heavily upon His help, in those moments I am surest that the dead are not lost, that those whom this Christ in whom I trust has taken He is keeping. The more He lives to me the more they live. I want to make you feel this power of the living Christ to-day. Another year has gone from us since last Easter and taken its dead with it. Out of your families and out of this parish family of ours they have gone. Your hearts are telling them over as I speak. The little child and the tired old man. The brave and hopeful boys and girls carrying their hope and courage and aspiration into other worlds, and leaving behind them memories in which the beauty and the dearness and the pride, struggle with the sadness till we cannot separate them or tell which is the greatest. The young mother has left her children. The husband has left the wife. The wife has gone down the dark way before the husband. The bright and sunny friend whom many knew, and whom all who knew him loved for his kind heart and ready charity and cheerful temper and patient spirit and constant unselfishness and simple faith. All these have gone from us to the world of God. As I wrote this I turned to our parish book, and looked down the list, and it was indeed a long one. The old and the young, their deaths stood written there together like the mingled graves in a graveyard. There were more old than young, and yet the young were not few. But as I read and thought of Easter Day, I could not think that they were gone. On the first Easter Day the graves were opened, and the dead came forth and went into the holy city, and were seen of many. If the city of our heart is holy with the presence of a living Christ, then the dear dead will come to us and we shall know they are not dead but living, and bless Him who has been their Redeemer, and rejoice in the work that they are doing for Him in His perfect world, and press on joyously towards our own redemption, not fearing even the grave, since by its side stands He whom we know and love, who has the keys of death and hell. A living Christ, dear friends! the old, ever new, ever blessed Easter truth! He liveth; He was dead; He is alive for evermore. Oh that everything dead and formal might go out of our creed, out of our life, out of our heart to-day. He is alive! Do you believe it? What are you dreary for, O mourner? what are you hesitating for, O worker? what are you fearing death for, O man? Oh, if we could only lift up our heads and live with Him; live new lives, high lives, lives of hope and love and holiness, 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. XIII. A TRINITY-SUNDAY SERMON. "For through Him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father."EPH. ii. 18. TO-DAY is Trinity-Sunday. That truth from which our church takes its name; that truth which is the centre and circumference of our faith, this one day is specially set apart for its commemoration, and we are to talk of it with one another. But nothing could be worse for us than to think that the truth of the Trinity was one that could be separated from all others and laid aside by itself, to be specially taken up and discussed upon a given day. Why, we are preaching on the Trinity always. I should count any Sunday's work unfitly done in which the Trinity was not the burden of our preaching. For when we preach the Fatherhood of God we preach His divinity; when we point to Christ the perfect Saviour, it is a Divine Redeemer that we declare; and when we plead with men to hear the voice and yield to the persuasions of the Holy Spirit, the Comforter into whose comfort we invite them is Divine. The divinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, this is our Gospel. By this Gospel we look for salvation. It is a Gospel to be used, to be believed in, and to be lived by; not merely to be kept and admired and discussed and explained. But, as a telescope which is valued for its precious uses may be sometimes taken down and its parts examined, its beautiful construction analyzed, so the truth of the Trinity may sometimes be made the subject of a special lecture. Only we are always to remember that the truth is given to us, not to be lectured on, but to be lived by; as the telescope is precious because it can sweep the sky and separate the star-dust into recognizable worlds; and not because its parts are beautifully adjusted and its whole construction is a miracle of mechanism. There is always a tendency to value doctrines for their symmetry and interior consistency, instead of for their uses; as if we built a new steamengine and kept it under a glass-house, instead of setting it upon the road. Its efficiency upon the road is the only true test of whether it is really worthy of the homage that we would pay it in its crystal shrine. Let us remember this always as we talk and think about the doctrine of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity is the description of what we know of God. We have no right to say that it is the description of God; for what there may be in Deity of which we have no knowledge, how can we tell? We are only sure that the divine life is infinitely greater than our humanity can comprehend; and we are sure, too, that not even a revelation in the most perfect form, through the most perfect medium conceivable, could make known to the human intelligence anything in God save that which has relationship to human life. Man may reveal himself to the brutes, and the revelation may be clear and correct so far as it can go, but it must have its limit. Only that part of man can cross the line and show itself to the perception of that lower world which finds in brutedom some point which it can touch. Our strength -- may reveal itself to their fear; our kindness to their power of love; some part of our wisdom, even, to their dim capacity of education; but all the while there is a vast manhood of intellect, of taste, of spirituality, of which they never know. And so I am sure that the divine nature is three persons, but one God; but how much more than that I cannot know. That deep law which runs through all life, by which the higher any nature is, the more manifold and simple at once, the more full of complexity and unity at once, it grows, is easily accepted as applicable to the highest of all natures, — God. In the manifoldness of His being these three personal existences, Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, easily make themselves known to the human life. I tell the story of them, and that is my doctrine of the Trinity. But let me not say that that is all. To other worlds of other needs, and so of other understandings (for our needs are always the avenues for our intelligence), other sides of the personal force of the divine life must have issued. It is not for us to catalogue and inventory Deity; only in humble gratitude and reverence to bear our witness of the manifestation of God to us for our salvation. And so our doctrine of the Trinity is our account of what we know of God. Hear This idea seems to be borne out by our text. it again: "Through Christ Jesus we all have access by one Spirit unto the Father." St. Paul is not describing God. He is recounting the story that he loves to tell, the story of man's salvation. That story is always breaking from his eager lips. In his encouragements and his rebukes, in his consolations and his arguments, the history of man's salvation to God, through Jesus, by |