And here also is the deliverance from the other source of anxiety. By uniting the belief in God to the belief in Him, by no longer accepting the first as a tradition from their fathers, the second as belonging especially to themselves, by perceiving that the one is involved in the other, they would enter into the mystery of His speech respecting His own departure; they would see that it was not wilfully obscure; they would know what hindered them from following them, and how they might follow Him. He could not talk of going to the grave--that would convey altogether a false impression about Him and themselves. He had not come out of the grave; that had not been His original home; and to His original home He was returning. There was no other mode of speaking: He was going to His Father's house. And that was their house too. He was not entering it to claim it for Himself, but for them. There were dwellings in it for them all; if not so, He '_would have told them_.' Why would He have told them? Because He had been continually speaking to them of a Father who had sent Him, of a Father whom they were to know, of a Father who was drawing them towards Him. If there was no issue of His mission; if He had done all His work by merely giving them a glimpse of a divine kingdom; if they and He were not to rest in it together; would He not have scattered the false hopes which they were beginning to form, which His own language had kindled? Yes, brethren! that awful dream which shook the heart of the German poet,--the dream of Christ coming into the world with the message, 'There is no God. You have no Father,' must have been realized, if He did not come with the other message, 'I can declare to you the name of your God. You have a Father. I am come to lead you to Him.' He himself shows us that this is the alternative. 'I would have told you,--I would have sent you to tell the world,--that all the thoughts it has ever entertained of an intercourse between earth and heaven, of a ladder by which man may ascend to God, are lying thoughts, inspired by the spirit of lies; unless I could have said, "There is a Father's house; there are many mansions in it; and I am going to prepare a place for you."' Oh! let us consider it well. Our Christianity must either sweep away all that has sustained the life and hopes of human creatures to this hour; it must become the most inhuman, the most narrow, the most God-denying system that the world has yet seen; it must prepare the way for a general atheism; or it must proclaim a Son of Man who unites mankind to God, who is a way by which the spirit of every man may ascend to the Father who is seeking it.