TO. 246.]

[VOL. X.

THE PENNY

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ST. MARTIN'S CHURCH, CANTERBURY,

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THE CLOUD OF WITNESSES:

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No.246.] THE PENNY SUNDAY READER. [Vol. X.

Sept. 15, 1839.-The Sixteenth Sunday after Trinity.

THE ASCENSION DAY.

OUR Lord's Ascension did not immediately follow His Resurrection; between these two important events there was an interval of forty days; during which time our risen Redeemer had frequent interviews with His disciples, partly that He might more fully convince them of the fact of His resurrection from the grave, and partly that He might more fully instruct them in the mysteries "pertaining to the kingdom of God."

The place from which our Lord ascended was, as St. Luke tells us in his Gospel (xxiv. 50), the village of Bethany; or as he relates it in the Acts (i. 12), the Mount of Olives, upon the declivity of which Bethany stood. This mount was about a mile to the east of Jerusalem, and was much frequented by our Lord during those periods of His three years' public ministry, which He passed in the Holy City. Upon this elevated place, which commanded a view of Jerusalem, and especially of the Temple, many of our Saviour's discourses to His disciples were delivered; so that Bishop Hall calls it His "Pulpit." Thence, indeed, was His "doctrine wont to distil like the dew, and His prayers to ascend as incense." And the very same mount was the place of His agony; but now the hill of His victory and triumph. How fit was it that the same place which witnessed the

weakness of His humanity, by the acuteness of His sufferings, should now testify His Godhead by His glorious ascension thence!

The place to which He ascended was the highest Heaven-His exalted abode-His everlasting habi tation. "Having," says St. Bernard, "already proved Himself Lord of earth, sea, and hell: as the earth acknowledged Him her Lord, when at His command she rendered up Lazarus, and afterwards quaked at His passion: the sea obeyed Him when it became like a pavement of marble beneath His sacred feet, and His treasury for tribute; and hell confessed Him conqueror, when Satan was vanquished in the wilderness; it now remained that, as Lord of Heaven also, he should pass through all the yielding regions of the air into the glory of the highest Heavens." The Scripture speaks of three Heavens (2 Cor. xiii.), the first taken for the element of air, in which the clouds move, and the birds fly (Gen. i.); the second, that part of space which is above the firmament, and which is the place of the sun, moon, and stars; "The Heavens declare the glory of God:" (Psalm xix.) but the third, "The Heaven of Heavens," is that glorious region in which "there are many mansions:" thither was St. Paul rapt, as he tells us (2 Cor. xii. 2), where he calls it "the third Heaven," in relation to the former two.

St. Augustine speaks of a different threefold division, which we think it right to mention here, because it is noticed with commendation by many expositors. "The corporeal heaven," says he, "contains the spheres and the whole material fabric; the spiritual one is the habitation of angels, and of all blessed spirits departed in the faith of Christ, and love of God; the superintellectual is the place apart, solely appropriated to the Deity: and thither Christ now

ascended, as the Apostle signifies by that superlative expression far above all heavens' (Eph. iv.), into that highest paradise, that habitation of light inaccessible-the Holy of Holies." "This was the place of which our Saviour spake to his disciples, What and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before?' Had he been there before in body, it had been no such wonder that he should have ascended thither again: but that His body should ascend unto that place where the majesty of God was most resplendent; that the flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone,' should be seated far above all angels and archangels, all principalities and powers, even at the right hand of God; this was that which Christ propounded as worthy of their greatest admiration. Whatsoever heaven, then, is higher than all the rest which are called 'heavens;' whatsoever sanctuary is holier than all which are called Holies,' whatsoever place is of greatest dignity in all those courts above, into that place did He ascend, where in the splendour of His deity He was before he took upon Him our humanity 1."

The witnesses of our Lord's ascension were His disciples only. When now about to take His leave of them, "He led them," says St. Luke, 66 as far as to Bethany;" led them forth out of the city, to admonish them and us, that "we have here no continuing city, but must seek one to come;" led them forth only a few witnesses, to show that he was as private in all those actions which tended to His glory, as He was public in all those that pointed to His shame. Thus His poverty was laid open in an inn, in the most common and exposed part of an innthe stable; He is buffeted and derided in Pilate's

1 Bishop Pearson.