It is to be observed that the sepulchre in which Christ was laid was a new one, the property of a rich man, and was situated beyond the gates of Jerusalem. Thus the Scriptures were fulfilled which declare that He should be “with the rich in His death (Isaiah liii. 9.) thus was fulfilled the type involved in the command that the ashes of the sacrifice should be carried without the camp, (Leviticus iv. 12. Heb. xiii. 11, 12). It was also a part of the proof necessary for the fact of the resurrection, that He had been laid, not in the place where the bodies of felons were usually cast, nor in any ordinary burying ground where other bodies lay, and where some deceit might have been practised by the disciples; and being a grave excavated in the rock it could only be approached by one entrance, and the entrance was guarded by sentinels and sealed. These circumstances are of vast importance as bearing on the reality of His resurrection, and they are proofs which easily and naturally present themselves to the mind. “There laid they Jesus.”—Observe its locality; it was in a garden, a lonely but a lovely resting place, constructed amid the arbors and flower-paths, and near it there would grow many a fragrant plant with leaves painted by heavenly art, and be like ornaments of beauty designed to relieve the gloom that overhangs the dwellings of the dead. Here there would be nothing to remind us of death, no sickening vapours of corruption; no mouldering fragments of humanity, to proclaim it a place of skulls. All around would breathe the spicy odours of the eastern clime; yea, from the sepulchre itself would exhale a balmy sweetness, fulfilling the words of the royal poet, “All thy garments smell Of myrrh and aloes and cassia: Out of the ivory palaces Whereby they have made thee glad.” And what does this flowery abode of death speak to us, Christian friends? It proclaims how death and the grave have been divested of all their terrible features by the work of Christ, how He hath planted flowers of heavenly promise around the margin of the tomb, perfumed the sepulchre itself with odours of eternal love, and scented the once hateful garments of the dead with the fragrance and freshness of a sure and certain immortality. It proclaims that there is nothing now in the chill and darkness of the narrow house, to alarm the fears of the dying Christian. For Jesus has been there and has left within it the impress of His own form, and has changed its aspect and altered its character. It is no longer a prison-house, but the vestibule of heaven, in which the children of the kingdom repose their wearied frames before they enter with spiritual bodies on the employments of a glorious eternity. “And there,” says St. Matthew, “was Mary Magdalene and the other Mary sitting over against the sepulchre.” Let us draw near, and share with them their holy musings.