Our Lord speaks to us by His resurrection with a voice which has a power of making itself heard, and making itself felt, at every age of life and every stage of experience. No child of Christian parents can have the thought of death as an actual dark fact brought before his mind, without having its darkness in some measure lightened for him by his having learned how God's only Son our Lord, who was crucified, dead, and buried, on the third day rose again from the dead. As years go on, and knowledge and experience widen, and thought grows more active, we come to learn how much more is wrapped up in that one mighty event than we had dreamed at first; for the message of Easter is indeed the one foundation of all rational faith, and of all sure and sober hope. In its first simplicity, in the form ‘God hath raised His Son Jesus from the dead,’—this was what made the Apostles new men, and sent them forth to live and to die proclaiming it to others, and thereby to begin that wondrous change in men's thoughts and deeds by which Christendom has arisen. Believing this, we have the keystone which fits into and holds together all the upward thought of man, all the recognition of a living and loving God above, without which the seeming order of the world is found to dissolve at last into unmeaning disorder and dreary ruin.