render a more complete obedience, he would at last pass away to God through the gate of the grave, and stand holy and perfect in the presence of Christ. Christ had indeed been ever present with him; but because while life lasted some particles of the old Adam would necessarily cling to every man, the Christian's mortal eye on earth could not see Him. Hedged in by 'his muddy vesture of decay,' his eyes, like the eyes of the disciples of Emmaus, are holden, and only in faith he feels Him. But death, which till Christ had died had been the last victory of evil, in virtue of his submission to it, became its own destroyer, for it had power only over the tainted particles of the old substance, and there was nothing needed but that these should be washed away, and the elect would stand out at once pure and holy, clothed in immortal bodies, like refined gold, the redeemed of God. The being who accomplished a work so vast--a work compared to which the first creation appears but a trifling difficulty--what could He be but God? God Himself! Who but God could have wrested his prize from a power which half the thinking world believed to be his coequal and coeternal adversary? He was God. He was man also, for He was the second Adam--the second starting-point of human growth. He was virgin born, that no original impurity might infect the substance which He assumed; and being Himself sinless, He showed, in the nature of his person, after his resurrection, what the material body would have been in all of us except for sin, and what it will be when, after feeding on it in its purity, the bodies of each of us are transfigured after its likeness. Here was the secret of the spirit which set St. Simeon on his pillar and sent St. Anthony to the tombs--of the night watches, the weary fasts, the penitential scourgings, the life-long austerities which have been alternately the glory and the reproach of the mediaeval saints. They desired to overcome their animal bodies, and anticipate in life the work of death in uniting themselves more completely to Christ by the destruction of the flesh, which lay as a veil between themselves and Him.