But who does not realize that we need very strong evidence, and the firmest assurances, to sustain flesh and blood amid such bitter trials as men and women are now experiencing--fathers and mothers, wives and sisters, lovers and friends? It is not, perhaps, even a St. Paul whose word alone would be sufficient to bear that strain. If we had only that to depend on we could but speak of hope and trust; we could hardly say, as he goes on to say, that “we know” that if our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved we have a building of God, a house eternal in the heavens. But the ground of his knowledge was the reality of our Lord’s resurrection, and the assurances which our Lord, when so raised, had given him. We know, he says, “that He Who raised up the Lord Jesus shall raise up us also by Jesus.” The great certainty from which St. Paul’s Gospel starts is that our Lord, Who had undoubtedly suffered death in its most agonizing form, had not less undoubtedly risen from the dead, and appeared again and again to St. Paul, as to many others, and had given him the personal assurances on which we are invited to rely. That is the cardinal fact of the Christian Faith. Had our Saviour not risen, had He not appeared in such a form as to prove that He had completely overcome death, then we should still, at the best, have been in the region of hopes and imperfect beliefs, and of a yearning trust. We could not have said, with the Apostle, that we know that Christ is risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept. But now it is no mere prophet or Apostle, but the risen Saviour Himself, Who stands in the midst of human life, as He stood in the midst of His disciples on the morrow of His resurrection, and Who said Himself, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live, and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me shall never die.” Those were His own words; that is the conviction He stamped upon the mind and heart of such men as St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. John; and that is the sure foundation on which we stand in believing that, if we suffer and die with Christ, we shall also live with Him.