And still through all, penetrating and rising above all the tides of sound, sounded the deep voice of Leo. Through the Passion-tide he had been preaching to them the duty of the taking up the Cross of Christ, that their actual life might enshrine within it the Paschal solemnity. “If then, dearly beloved,” he said, “we believe in our hearts what we profess, we also have been raised the third day, for ‘ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.’ Let the people of God acknowledge themselves to be a new creation in Christ Jesus, and, with souls on the watch, understand Him by Whom they have been apprehended, and Whom they may apprehend. “Let not the things that have been made new return to the old state which abideth not; and let not him who put his hand to the plough give up his work, but fix his attention on what he is sowing, not looking back to what he has left.” Again—“Though the rolling away of the stone, the emptying of the sepulchre, the laying aside the linen, the shining of the angels, did abundantly establish the reality of our Lord’s Resurrection, yet He mercifully appeared to the women; He suffered Himself to be handled with careful and inquisitive touch by those of whom doubt was taking hold.” Thus the faithful voice led the people on through Easter to the Ascension. Very quiet were the words, not exhausting the joy in a burst of rapture, but leading it onward and upward in an ever-rising tide of certainty and victory “too deep for sound or foam”; very quiet, quiet and strong as the first flood-tide of the first joy of the first Easter. Nor did he forget the doubt, the heavy weight of apprehension, the slow reviving to faith of the hearts of the disciples benumbed by sorrow; the magnitude of the weight which gives the true measure of the power which lifted it. “For the death of Christ,” he said, “had sorely disturbed the hearts of the disciples, and a kind of torpor of distrust had slowly crept into minds oppressed by sorrow, on account of the humiliation of the Cross, the yielding up of the spirit, the burial of the lifeless body.