"I am to depart, you to remain; but which shall have the happier lot, who can tell?" So spake Socrates to his friends just before he drank the fatal hemlock. In all the utterances of the ancient philosophy there is no sadder word. The uncertainty of the hereafter, the impenetrable gloom that shrouds the state of the departed, sets the contemplative soul shivering with mortal dread. Like the expiring Hobbes, more than two thousand years later, the grand old Athenian felt himself "taking a leap in the dark." In his case, however, there was more excuse than in that of the modern unbeliever. The dayspring from on high had not yet visited mankind. The morning star was still below the horizon. Four centuries must pass before the rising Sun of righteousness could bring the perfect day. The Christ came, the true Light of the world; and life and immortality, dawning from his manger, culminated upon his sepulchre. Redeeming Love has revealed to us more of God and man than all the sages of antiquity ever knew; and our reviving and ascending Redeemer has shed a flood of radiance upon the grave and whatever lies beyond. In the immortal Christ we have a sufficient answer to the patriarch's question--"If a man die, shall he live again?" In his mysteriously constituted personality taking our nature into union with the Godhead, by his vicarious passion ransoming that nature, and then rising with it from the dead and returning with it to heaven, he assures all who believe in him of an actual alliance with the living God and all the blissful immunities of life eternal. And thus the apostle's statement becomes the best expression of our filial hope in Christ: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is."