THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1927. THE EASTER SEASON.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20075, 16 April 1927, Page 12

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 1927. THE EASTER SEASON.

Nearly nineteen centuries, have elapsed since tho occurrence df the most momentous event recorded in the annals of mankind. In the year 29 our ancestor* were savage men of Britain, Norway, Denmark or Germany. Thor, the god of thunder, or some other projection deified from man’s own nature, ruled among men. Among tho cultured writers of Greece and Rome only one, Virgil, had a vision of the peace that is to be when the kindly earth shall slumber, lapped in universal law. And Virgil’s inspiration in the famous Messianic eclogue, written a generation before our Saviour’s birth, may, if internal evidence is trustworthy, have derived its inspiration from Isaiah’s picture of a golden age, not in some far off Eden of the past, but in the divine consummation towards which the whole creation moves. Across the cataclysms of those nineteen centuries, amid the clash of arms, the decay of the mighty Roman Empire, tho rise and decay of many a kingdom since, amid all the fateful drama of our human life, has resounded with ever-increasing charm, “My peace I leave with you.” The Cross in itself, humanly regarded, without relation to subsequent events, is a symbol of failure. It is the cutting short of earthly works and of heavenly hopes. If the story had ended there, the words of the New Testament could never have become the words of life. The very rise and existence of Christianity itself declare that the divine work was not terminated on Calvary. A small body of men, without money or resources, without education, without powerful friends and without influence, hated by the upper classes amongst the Jews, in deadly terror of their lives from the Roman soldiery and a Roman governor whose lightest word could have sent them also to the cross, men without hope of reward, deprived of every incentive to action by which men are usually animated—their Master dead terribly and visibly before them, between two thieves—such was the condition of Christ’s Immediate followers on tho first Good Friday. Yet in a very short time, those poor, ignorant and unfriended men had begun a course of work, of religion and of conduct which has changed, is changing, and will continue to change the current of men’s thoughts. This fact, and this alone, is sufficient witness that Christ rose to those men; that He appeared to them and gave them an unshakable assurance that He was with them to the end of the world. Death had been vanquished ; there was no death; there was change, a greater life, continued work, tho glory of going on. Powers and principalities could not prevail against the knowledge these men had—“what I know is that, whereas I was blind, now I see”; there was ocular and auricular and tangible evidence. If Annas and Caiaphas and the Pharisees and Pontius Pilate and King Herod and tho Emperor Tiberius had been told that these men were destined to revolutionise the Roman Empire and to bring about a revaluation of all things human, they would have laughed such an idea to scoru. To them it would have been mere madness, as to Pilate was the saying, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

Though Good Friday reminds us of death, the outstanding feature of tho Easter festival is life. Without the risen life, no Christian religion as at present conceived would have been preached and propagated. Without that, preaching is vain and faith is vain, or as the Greek word literally translated in modern speech would be, “empty.” That is, faith without the risen life ia empty; there is nothing in it, neither hope of spiritual support in this world, nor hope of anything beyond this bourne of time and space; no anticipatory joy of re-seeing those we have loved and lost from sight; no ideal visualisation of a new and glorious city where there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain. If tho Easter Resurrection be taken away, we have no assurance of any future life. We are where the sad-theughted Ecclesiastes was: “The dead know not anything, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten.” If that were so and man wore a mere clay organism, broken utterly at death, his invisible self never to function again in thought or aspiration, in memory or hope, then would tho senmalist be sternly right, “Let us eat, drink and bo merry, for to morrow we die.” Easter may well be for us a season of spiritual exultation and exaltation, bringing with it tho great, memory of the dawning of a new light on human life, the introduction of a new factor into man's upward evolution, — “Thou wilt not. leave ns in tho du.-f ; Thou madc-l man: ho knows not why; lie thinks lie was not made fo die, Ami 'thou ii.r-t made him—Thou arc just.” Genesis pictures man as formed from the dust of the earth. Easter is our assurance that unto dust ho will not

refum. About the year 100 A.D. a gentle Roman wrote a letter that is still extant, begging the recipient to offer him some hope in his grief for a dear one just dead: “I beseech you give me some comfort; not the usual platitudes about age and disease—all this I know—but something new, something big, something I have never heard or read of.” It is a pity such a Roman had not become acquainted with the meaning of Good Friday. All his wealth and power and ability left him less happy in the face of death than tine humblest Christian who in his day had to face the lions.