Could he have spoken otherwise, brethren? Did he not wish us to consider this act as the sign of a truth, as the exercise of a power, which circumstances cannot affect, which is proving its vitality from age to age? Why should he comment? Why should he wonder? The commentary was to be in the history of the world; the wonder was to be renewed in the case of every brother, whom Christian hands were to lay in the grave, 'earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,' in sure and certain hope that Christ is '_the resurrection and the life, and that whosoever believeth in Him, though he were dead, yet should he live_.' When we think of the return of Lazarus to his house at Bethany, it is not with an unmixed delight. We ask whether he could have welcomed the world's confusions which he had escaped? whether the thought must not have haunted him, that after a little while he should be in the same cave again? These are questions which it may be well for us to consider; though, perhaps, they are not different in kind from those which arise when any one who has been on the borders of the unseen world, who has taken leave of kinsfolk and friends, who has had glimpses of another country, suddenly recovers, and has to adapt himself once more--for a time probably with a strange sense of awkwardness and incoherency--to the business and intercourse of the earth. In one case as in the other, I conceive there is but this solution of the difficulty. The man must be glad to be placed where it pleases Christ that he should be placed. He will not certainly be nearer Him by complaining of his destiny, or by not desiring exactly the work which has been given him to do. If he has dreamed of a heaven above where he shall be under some other law than that, or where his will must not be in conformity with that law, the dream will never be realized. So, doubtless, Lazarus was taught by his discipline. And this may have been to him, if he could take it in, a greater comfort than even his appearance again beside the old hearth,--a compensation for all he might suffer then or afterwards,--that through him multitudes unborn were to learn the meaning of their own death, the secret of their own life, and who is the Friend that interprets them both. To each man who has been near the grave, and has come back to ever such commonplace duties, something of the same blessing may be given. He may think of One who hallows the common feast as well as the grave, who binds both worlds together. To the question-- "Where wast thou, brother, those four days? There lives no record of reply, Which telling us what it is to die, Had surely added praise to praise." So we think very naturally. And yet, if we reflect, we shall perceive that those four days can only have been a part of the education of Lazarus,--that they cannot have been separate from all his previous and all his later experience.