If any be content to believe they are the mere chance offspring from creatures of lust, ferocity, and shameless strife, so let it be; they must even reap as they sow. Their next creed is plain enough, and easy of practice; eat, then, drink, and to-morrow die. But let us, as Christians, fly to the greater, nobler doctrine than this, for the one reason that we are the offspring of the living God, made in His image; and having in us the breath of the Almighty, cannot die. Our very framework of flesh and blood was that form and fashion of a man in which Christ, the Blessed One, came to us on earth, in which He lived and suffered; was tempted, scorned, mocked, and nailed to the accursed tree. It is in His memory that we keep this solemn season; His whose blood was shed, whose body was broken, when the heavens grew dark, and the earth trembled as He yielded up the ghost. It was to glorify this human shape, and to redeem the living soul within it, that He endured the bitter cross. His death, His passion, His resurrection, are to us what they are, because wrought in human form, to be crowned with new splendour and glory in Heaven. Again I say, let us be content with this hope which has been the only stay of countless thousands in every age since Christ trod the shores of Galilee, and spake to the listening thousands by the sea. Let us be content with the plain living words of Him who is Truth itself, who was before the world began, who spake and there was light, who breathed into the lifeless dust and it lived; Himself, the King and the Prince of all Life, the Beginning and the End, the First and the Last; who will still remain unchanged and unchangeable when this world of sin and shame has become the kingdom of His Christ; when human philosophy has died out, and human science failed; but the greater, and purer, and nobler wisdom abides—greater, because God, the author of it, is mightier than man; purer because it wins men from the base things that perish, and nobler because Heaven is higher than earth. Let us hold fast to this belief, firmly, through life; that it fail us not on the bed of death, as we draw near to the twilight of eternal day, and to the fulness of knowledge which is Life.