Come, forgiven sinner, lift up your head, for God hath cleansed you. Be happy: be a Christian: be a man once more, for you are clothed again in the garments of innocence and sanctity. It is no incomplete and grudging pardon He has given you. Though your sins "were as scarlet," they are now as "white as snow;" though they were "red like crimson," they are "as white as wool." "He hath cast your sins into the bottom of the sea." They shall never be mentioned to you again. He has even restored to you again the merits you had acquired in days of innocence, and lost again by sin. He has "_restored to you the years which the locust and the caterpillar and the mildew and the palmer-worm hath eaten_." [Footnote 102] Let, then, gratitude fill your heart, let joy be written on your face, and let holy resolves for the future correspond to the mercy you have received. [Footnote 102: Joel ii. 25.] {358} Yes, my brethren, Christ at His Sepulchre satisfies the intellect and heals the conscience--and He also silences another cry of human woe. It is that of which the prophet spoke when he said: "_A voice was heard of lamentation, of mourning and weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refused to be comforted, because they are not_." [Footnote 103] [Footnote 103: Jer. xxxi. 15.] Oh! it is hard to see one we love die, but is it not harder to our sensitive nature to bury them? That makes us feel what we have lost. Reason tells us that the soul is immortal, but we need something more for our comfort. The heart asks, "What is to become of the body that I loved so much?" Talk of the lifeless and speechless corpse. It is not lifeless and speechless to me. Those cold lips smile the old smile on me, and whisper in my ear a thousand words of kindness. And oh, to part with that! To lose even that sad comfort! To have the body of the dead taken away from us, is not that a grief? Such was Mary Magdalene's sorrow. "_They have taken away my Lord out of the Sepulchre, and I know not where they have laid Him_." [Footnote 104] [Footnote 104: St. John xx. 2.]