OW precious are the hours appropriated to the worship of the Most High! How soothing to the wounded spirit the sacred offices of religion! In the assembly of the saints a heavenly peace diffuses itself over the soul. Amidst the solemn invocations of earnest prayer the world and all its vanities disappear. Its corroding cares, anxieties, and fears are banished from the heart, and replaced by freedom, joy, and blessed hopes. The swelling anthem of divine praise bears, upon wings of melody, into the deepest recesses of our nature the transporting truths of revelation, awakens the dearest [152] memories of the past, or marshals in bright array the crowding visions of the future. What thronging images cluster around the welling fountains of thought and feeling! How enrapturing these spiritual delights which are the pre-libations of future blessedness! How sweetly the responsive fervors of gratitude and love commingle with the pensive meditations of penitence or remorse! How clearly now are the secrets of the heart revealed before the bar of conscience! How swiftly doth busy memory recall, in all its moral relations, the history of the past!

      Where now are those once dearly loved, with whom we held sweet converse and communion--the friends of our youth, now perhaps alienated or long forgotten? The tokens of affection unrequited, the consciousness of duties unfulfilled, the remembrance of the dear ones who rest in the cold and silent grave, and to whom we may speak no word of regret and offer no evidence of unchanged regard, are all strangely interwoven with the deep joyfulness of the present and with the glad assurances of an eternal reunion in the realms of glory. We see them [153] again in the visions of memory. We hear again their voices re-echoing in our hearts. We receive again their glances of confidence and love. But, ah! we long in vain to clasp the fleeting shades, and to confess how far we failed to reciprocate their tenderness or appreciate their solicitude and loving care. Amidst the tumult of our feelings, how sweet those tears which flow unbidden, yet, ah! how unavailingly, save as they serve to reveal us to ourselves, to chasten our affections and assure our hopes! How delightful are those moments, rich in blessing, when the soul dissolves, as it were, in a grief that is full of joy, in the consciousness it gives of the immortal nature and unmeasured depths and capacities of our moral and spiritual being!

      But, alas! for that apostate memory, that nature lost to love and truth, that here, in presence of these sacred memorials of a love which, as the sunlight hides the stars, obscures, by its superior glory, all mere human affections, may experience no remorse and realize no blessedness! These consecrated emblems speak to us of Him who hath washed us from our [154] sins in his own blood--of Him who, while we were yet enemies, hath given himself for us that he might redeem us from death and ransom us from the power of the grave. Alas! for the insensibility of this poor sin-stricken heart, for that paralysis of the inner nature which enfeebles and benumbs our spiritual powers! How often, alas! since that divine love was assured to us in the blest time of our espousals, have we failed to fulfill our vows of faithfulness! How often have we forgotten the enduring constancy, and unswerving truth, and boundless love of our adorable Redeemer! How often have we become negligent of his instructions! How often have we rebelled against his authority! How often been ungrateful for his benefits!

      And now he is presented here to us wounded to death in our behalf. That disfigured visage, that bleeding form so "marred more than the sons of men," those pierced hands which he had stretched forth only to bless, those beautiful but now lacerated feet which had borne him on his heavenly mission of love--here present themselves to the eye of Faith, [155] and we seem to witness that now lifeless body, enshrouded in the habiliments of death and laid in the dark and silent tomb. Alas! shall those ears, once ever open to the cry of the suffering and the penitent, never more receive our words of sorrow and contrition? Shall those loving eyes never more welcome our return? Shall those divine lips never more greet us with the assurance: "Thy sins are forgiven thee?" Shall we never more renew the blessed fellowship of the past? Alas! how vain are tears of grief, or words of penitence, or promises of amendment, when the grave has hidden from our eyes the neglected or the injured! How fruitless now are self-reproaches! How futile now the hope of renewing the sweet intimacies of friendship or of love!

      But, oh! what startling revelation meets us here! "Now hath Christ risen from the dead and become the first fruits of them that slept." Shall we then, indeed, once more be permitted to behold him? Shall we again listen to his voice? Shall we again receive his favor and enjoy his presence? Assuredly not, if, with the eager haste of [156] carnal doubt that trusts alone to sensuous proofs, we rush, like Peter or John, to gaze into the tomb of the crucified Redeemer. We shall perceive there naught but the cerements of the dead, and shall return unblessed and unrewarded. Oh! it is in these solemn moments, when the seen seems to blend itself with the unseen, when Time merges into Eternity and Death resolves itself into Life, that the heart commands a solemn and a sacred pause. It is in this hour that we may stand, in the stillness of trustful hope and in the conscious helplessness of our feeble nature, to see the salvation of God. The spiritual perception of the soul requires the faith of the affections, the loving confidence of the heart, and it is with Mary we must remain in patient waiting for Jesus, if we would indeed receive the joyful assurance of an angelic vision, or be permitted to see once more in reality the risen Lord. Near as he was to Peter and to John they saw, they heard him not; they trusted to their own perceptions; they relied upon their own understandings. Oh! that we may judge not by feeble sense, but in faith and love await our Savior! It is here he shall then meet with us to [157] inquire: "Why weepest thou?" "Whom seekest thou?" It is here we may again enjoy our blissful communion as of old, and hear his guiding words of truth, and renew our vows of fealty. And it is here we shall be permitted to rejoice in the blessed assurance that, at the appointed time in the bright regions of eternal glory, we shall rejoin the loved and lost, where all sorrow shall be forgotten, all tears be wiped away, all faithful love and fellowship be restored, and where, amidst fullness of joy and spiritual blessedness, "we shall be forever with the Lord." [158]

[CITS 152-158]