---

"Spirits" — because resurrection is future. The bodies still tenant the grave or the deep — only the spirits are free. This is that state of "deliverance from the bondage of the flesh," in which Jesus Himself, quickened with a new vitality, went and preached, between death and resurrection, to "spirits," themselves separate from the body. This is that state, "Paradise" Jesus called it, in which the dying penitent beside Him should that day be His companion, spirit with spirit. "Just men," or righteous: not in that self-righteousness "which is of the law"; not in that righteousness which Christ Himself, He said, came not so much as to "call" or to evangelise; on the contrary, "just" in the justice of the Just One — righteous in the merit of a full justification, and in the grace of a progressive and at last perfect sanctification. "Just men made perfect." Completed and consummated in that holiness which, begun below by the work of the Holy Spirit, is at last finished and accomplished for ever; to be sullied no more, nor grieved any more, by the contact or presence of evil: sealed now with the stamp of a blessed immortality, and waiting only the gift of a transformed body to make the whole man anew in the very image and likeness of God. "Ye are come to the spirits of just men made perfect." We read and speak often of Christ's coming — His coming in the flesh, His coming in the Spirit, His coming in glory. Here we read of an advent, not of Christ, but of the Christian; an advent, not in the future tense, but in the perfect — not anticipative or progressive, but finished and done. But this is not the world which the text opens. The text bids us see ourselves tenants and citizens of a world out of sight. Like the prophet's servant in Dothan, we are to open our eyes to a mountain full of chariots and horsemen of fire — and those "chariots" of God are "thousands of angels"; and those "horsemen" are God's saints, already gone from amongst the living, but present with us, for companionship and for sympathy and for communion still. You have had, you have made, an advent — an advent for abode, an advent for perpetuity. "Ye are come to the spirits of just men made perfect."

1. The first and least thing here said — itself great and glorious too — is the union of the Christian living with the Christian dead in their faith and in their example. It is a thought not without comfort, that, as Christians, we have an ancestry and a pedigree. The continuity is not broken. The Church of all time is one. Then disgrace not your family. Bring no blot upon your escutcheon. You are come to the spirits of the perfect. You join on to them in the genealogical tree. Be followers, be imitators of them, as they once, in their day and generation, were of Christ.

2. Ye are come to the spirits and souls of the righteous in their sympathy. There is a living as well as a memorial sympathy between the Church on earth and the Church in heaven. All the glimpses given us in Holy Scripture of the mind and life of Paradise seem to point this way. It was of no sleeping soul that Christ spoke on the Cross to the malefactor beside Him. It is no bathing in Lethe, for the obliteration of earth's memories and the annihilation of human affections, which the gospel opens to us as the prize of the race to him that overcometh. "Rest with us" is something different from this selfish, this isolated, this drowsy repose. Even nature demands something different. There is an instinct as well as a revelation of this advent of the living to the departed. We want it for comfort, we want it for admonition. God has knit together His elect in one communion and fellowship. There is a communion of saints as well as a Catholic Church; the militant and the perfected are not two societies, they are one. Have any of as a friend in the happy land — father or mother, sister or wife, friend closer than a brother? Remember then, remember for use as well as for consolation, that you "are come" to that other — come, by an advent such as there is none between the living. The stripping off of this carcase gives a sympathy, gives a contact, gives an intuition of love such as cannot be had here. You are come to the dead, as you cannot come to the living. See then that you give joy, only joy, to the inhabitants of that world.

3. "Ye are come to the spirits of the righteous" in their single, their engrossing devotion to Christ their Lord. It is said, I scarcely care to ask whether in history or fiction, that there was one from whom had been taken away by the stroke of death " the desire of his eyes," the wife of his youth. He had laid her in the earth; yet night after night she visited him in his chamber, herself yet not herself, the same but a thousandfold more beautiful — and in that periodical converse, making night day for him and darkness light, he half forgot his bereavement and his desolation. One night she came, and he could not repress an exclamation upon her peculiar beauty. "I never saw you," he said, "so lovely." She said, "It is my last visit to you: to-morrow I am to see Him, and after that sight I shall have no eye for aught else." He saw her no more. Is not this, perhaps, the answer to those questions so often agitated by the mourner as to the future sight and recognition of friends? Be sure that nothing shall be denied thee in that world, which could give thee solace or satisfaction. If thou desirest there thy friend's face or voice or hand, be sure thou shalt have it. Nevertheless, when thou shalt have been there but a little while; when, if so it be, after a season of preparation, as it were of purifying and anointing for "the day of the espousals," thou shalt actually have seen the King in His beauty — I say not that thou shalt be debarred then from other sight or other converse; but this I say — the desire for aught else will have left thee; all other love, not destroyed, not diminished, rather ten thousandfold enhanced, will yet be absorbed and swallowed up in that; thy loved one, and thou, will be so wrapped up in another love and higher, that the selfish love will be gone, and only the Divine love will continue.

(Dean Vaughan.)

---

---

KJV: For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and darkness, and tempest,

WEB: For you have not come to a mountain that might be touched, and that burned with fire, and to blackness, darkness, storm,