So with Christ’s body. It was changed after He rose. It had gone through pain, and weakness, and death, gone down to the lowest depth of them, and conquered them, and passed triumphant through them and far beyond their power. His body was now a nobler, a more beautiful, a glorified body, a spiritual body, one which could do whatever His Spirit chose to make it do, one which could never die again, one which could come through closed doors, appear and vanish as He liked, instead of being bound to walk the earth, and stand cold and heat, sickness and weariness. Yet it was the very same body, just as the wheat-plant is the same as the wheat-seed—the very same body. Every one knew His face again after His resurrection. There was the very print of the nails to be seen in His hands and feet, the spear-wound in His blessed side. So shall it be with us, my friends. We shall rise again, and we shall be the same as we are now, and yet not the same; our bodies shall be the same bodies, and yet nobler, purer, spiritual bodies, which can know neither death, nor pain, nor weariness. Then, never care, my friends, if we drop like ripe grain into the bosom of mother earth,—if we are to spring up again as seedling plants, after death’s long winter, on the resurrection morn. Truly says the poet, {187} how “Mother earth, she gathers all Into her bosom, great and small: Oh could we look into her face, We should not shrink from her embrace.” No, indeed! for if we look steadily with the wise, searching eye of faith into the face of mother earth, we shall see how death is but the gate of life, and this narrow churchyard, with its corpses close-packed underneath the sod, would not seem to us a frightful charnel-house of corruption. No! it would seem like what it is—a blessed, quiet, seed-filled God’s garden, in which our forefathers, after their long-life labour, lay sown by God’s friendly hand, waiting peaceful, one and all, to spring up into leaf, and flower, and everlasting paradise-fruit, beneath the breath of God’s Spirit at the last great day, when the Sun of Righteousness arises in glory, and the summer begins which shall never end. One and all, did I say? Alas! would God it were so! We cannot hope as for all, but they are dead and gone, and we are not here to judge the dead. They have another Judge, and all shall be as He wills.