3. And lastly, my friends, we can not feel all these comforting and
glorious things in which our new life resembles the resurrection life
of our Lord, without being at the same time, on another side, moved
to sorrow by this resemblance. For if we put together all that the
evangelists and apostles of the Lord have preserved for us about His
resurrection life, we still can not out of it all form an entirely
consecutive history. There are separate moments and hours, separate
conversations and actions, and then the Risen One vanishes again from
the eyes that look for Him; in vain we ask where He can have tarried,
we must wait till He appears again. Not that in Himself there was
anything of this broken or uncertain life, but as to our view of it,
it is and can not be but so; and we try in vain to penetrate into the
intervals between those detached moments and hours. Well, and is
it not, to our sorrow, with the new life that is like Christ's
resurrection life? I do not mean that this life is limited to the few
hours of social worship and prayer, glorious and profitable as they
are; for in that case there would be cause to fear that it was a mere
pretense; nor to the services, always but small and desultory,
that each of us, actively working through the gifts of the Spirit,
accomplishes, as it were, visibly and tangibly according to his
measure, for the kingdom of God.
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