bringing good tidings. Christ is risen. {353} "The stroke of our wound is healed. "_To them that sat in the region of the shadow of death, light is sprung up." "The Day-Spring from on high hath visited us._" The earth feels herself to be lightened of her darkness, and in every church in Christendom the cry is again and again repeated: "_Alleluia: Praise the Lord_." It would be too long to attempt to show how every human sorrow can gather consolation from the Resurrection of Christ. All I can hope to do this morning is to show how the three heaviest troubles of our race--doubt, guilt, and bereavement--find their relief in that event. I call doubt, guilt, and bereavement the heaviest woes of man. In regard to the first, religious doubt, many of you have had no experience. Brought up in the Catholic Church, with her teaching always sounding in your ears, you have never known what it was to have real doubts about religious truth. But there are others who have known that anguish by experience. The soul of man thirsts for truth. Deep in every man's soul is a desire for God. It may be stifled, it may be silenced for a time by passion, but there it is, that stretching forth to the Fountain of Goodness and Beauty, that longing to know Him and His will. In generous souls, in souls that are conscious of their dignity, the finding of truth is an indispensable necessity. The search for truth is an occupation that must be pursued with whatever pain and trouble, and until it be found life is really insupportable. O my brethren, I do believe that there are souls around us who hunger for truth as a famishing man hungers for food. They labor and toil harder than any day-laborer. They are like men exploring a dark and many-chambered mine. They go with stooping head, and the sweat rolls off their foreheads, and their feet stumble, and with their dim light they can see but a little way before them, and they are in danger of losing their way. {354} No doubt they learn something; for God is everywhere; God is in our hearts, and in Nature, and in men, and in books, and in the past, and we cannot look for Him anywhere without finding His footprints; but we want more than this. We want God to speak to us. We sigh for the lost happiness of Eden, where God walked with our first parents in "the cool of the day." This is what men need. They need God to _reveal_ Himself to them, to give them certainty in religious truth, at least on the most important points. Everywhere men have been seeking this. "_Oh that God would rend the heavens and come down!_" [Footnote 93] [Footnote 93: Isaias lxiv. 1.]