It would be rather truer to the original, and more closely corresponding with the facts, to say--not that our Lord hath abolished death, for, alas! that still remains around us--but that He hath brought death to nought, annihilated its power, and destroyed its strength. “The last enemy,” we are told, “which shall be destroyed is death”; but meanwhile, for every Christian soul, its greatest distress and terror is gone because our Lord has thrown a glorious illumination upon it, and has “brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel.” He has enabled us to see beyond the grave, beyond those dreadful battlefields, strewn with the bodies of those whom we had loved and honoured, and has made manifest to us that they still live on in a new life, and a glorious immortality. Who can estimate the mercy to sad and sorrowing hearts of the establishment of that blessed hope on the firm assurance of our Lord Himself, who, after suffering an agonizing death here, appeared to His Apostles and declared, “Fear not; I am the first and the last: I am He that liveth, and was dead; and, behold, I am alive for evermore, Amen; and have the keys of hell and of death”? The pain of bereavement remains--that is like the loss of a limb, which time alone can soften--but the definite assurance, from the Saviour’s lips, that those who have died in His faith and obedience have entered on a new and blessed life, must be of infinite comfort to those who loved them. We are not left any longer to hopes and to future expectations; but can grasp the assurance of present realities which are vouched for by the Saviour who took our nature upon Him, who lived our life, and died our death, and showed Himself alive beyond the grave. This is what we owe to the Saviour’s birth, with all the gracious revelation of which it was the commencement.