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THE K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
at the door of the sepulchre they would have remembered no such words--but Sight now helped Faith. The grave was empty, the stone rolled away, celes tial visitants were the attendants of that gloomy place, and out of the depths of death they heard the voice of Resur rection;—“then they remembered his words.” That remembrance is all but fatal. There is a time when our reli gious remembrances will rather be aggravations of our sin than mitigations of our mistakes. What was it to remem ber the words when the grave was empty, when the angels were filling it with morning light, when the stone, fastened, sealed, watched, was hurled, back? It was nothing to remember then. That is true faith which sees in the darkness as well as in the light, which goes to the grave bearing no spices but the spices of the immovable certainty of the resurrection and the life. You take your spices to your graves in the form of flowers and im mortelles. It is pardonable, because the bones of the dead body are still hid den under the sod; it would be'better if we could look straight up into the blue morning and breathe upward the spice of a concentrated life and a hope ful and all-conquering spirit. For what purpose did the women come? According to Matthew they came to “see the sepulchre.” An athe ist might have done that, any man might have done it—but when Mary Magdalene and the other Mary do it, it seems as if the Heavens were closed up and the earth were a place that had no sky. We trust to the womanly heart to keep up our noblest hopes, we give ourselves over into the custody, of that higher love and trust. When Mary Magdalene and the other Mary cease to pray, no man will have audacity enough to lift his face heavenward. The mother must save us, the housewife must make the house a sanctuary, the womanly" heart must keep the altar-fire ablaze.
in intellect,—would that you were also first in goodness. And you are first in energy,—would that you were also first in prayer. You in the third place are first in wealth—would God every golden piece you have were made more golden still by being transformed into the gold of the sanctuary. Be not satisfied with natural or hereditary primacies; over those you have next to no control, it may be; but in this primacy of good ness, where may elevation cease? There is no terminal point on that heaven ascending line. The women came to the sepulchre, and Luke gives us some additional and illustrative particulars about them and their coming. According to Luke’s account, the women came, “bringing the spices which they had prepared.” Not withstanding they had been distinctly told that Jesus Christ would rise again on the third day, with that singular obstinacy which distinguishes the pre judices of the human mind, those blessed and affectionate women came with their spices to embalm their Lord! How can you account for the stubborn ness of this view of death? The women had been told, and told by Jesus Christ himself, that on the third day he would rise again, and yet so treacherous is the memory, or so irreligious the heart, that Sight staggers Faith. The women saw him die; any recollection of a promise of “rising again” must have died in that death. So forgetting the predic tion, or regarding it as a sentiment that had perished, or otherwise viewing it as a hope rather than as a fact which lay within the possibility of accom plishment, they came “bringing their spices which they had prepared.” The angel chided them. Said the angel to them, “Remember how he spake,” and “they remembered his words,” but the remembrance of his words would have been of no avail to them two hours before they saw the angel. If they had found the stone
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