CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES.

JOHN xvi. 16.

ye

shall not

Jesus said unto his disciples, A little while and see me; and again a little while and ye shall see me, because I go to the Father.

THE interval which elapsed between the Passion of our blessed Lord, and the descent of the Holy Ghost upon the assembled disciples on the day of Pentecost, may be regarded as a period during which the little flock of believers were subjected to as painful trials as had ever been their lot. He who had been their support and stay during His abode among them, was gone; and there had not yet been sent that substitute for His bodily presence for which they had been taught to look. In the mean time, how dark and dreary, how all but desperate, their condition! The Shepherd had been taken, and

the sheep scattered. They had fled in terror, every one to his home; or remaining, had remained but to deny that they knew Him, for whose sake they yet had forsaken father and mother, and house and brethren. And when this panic had begun to abate, and they had again assembled together, as we read they did, in what direction could they look with hope? With what success could they attempt to disentangle the mazy web of God's providence; to reconcile themselves to that mysterious dispensation which appeared to annihilate their hopes, until the Spirit of Truth had come, who should guide them into the complete truth, and show them that "so it must needs be?" What consolation for those whose only guide had departed from them, before the advent of the Spirit of Comfort to dwell in them, and remain with them? No dangers to which the Son of God was exposed while He yet lived among them, no insults to which He was subjected, were probably so severe a trial of their faith as His absence. They had seen Him feed multitudes from a few barleyloaves and fishes; they had been witnesses how the elements were in subjection to Him,-how disease and death vanished at His word,-how the malice of men and of demons alike quailed before Him,-nay, even before those who bore His commission. He who saved others, might

well be expected to exert His power to save Himself; and this expectation doubtless remained with many until the last. Many there perhaps were who looked for the restoration of the kingdom to Israel, even at the moment when its King was invested, in cruel mockery, with the crown of thorns and the sceptre of reed; many, who raised their eyes from the rude soldiery parting His vestures among them, in the trust to see the vault of Heaven filled with legions of angels, avengers of His wrongs, and ministers of His wrath! And when, at last, the awful sacrifice was completed, and the crowds, who had been spectators of the scene, "beholding what happened, smote their breasts, and returned," immeasurable as must have been the dismay and horror of mind that possessed the disciples; yet even then the duty of performing the rites of sepulture to the Being in whom every hope and every affection had been laid up, as it occupied their attention, so also it may be conceived to have concentrated their grief, and, by that very concentration, composed their disturbed imaginations. But, when all had been done that could be done to honour the dead, then would the living return to the contemplation of their own desolate situation. To review the scenes in which their departed Lord had manifested His mighty power, -to recall His promises,-to repeat to one

another the words in which He had of late prophesied His triumph over the powers of evil, would be their natural procedure; and then would come the terrible trial of comparing the past with the present, the promise of victory with the apparent defeat; and there would occur the fearful suspicion that they had perhaps deceived themselves; that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Messias of whom Moses in the Law and the Prophets had written, and that His followers were of all men the most miserable.

This terrible agony of the spirit, however much it was alleviated by the appearance of our Lord among them, perhaps was not entirely at an end until the descent of the Holy Comforter upon the assembled disciples at last removed the veil from their eyes, and enabled them to see prophecy fulfilled, even where they had imagined it most to fail; to discover life in death, salvation in sacrifice,-complete triumph in apparent defeat. But, until that descent, the mental struggle of the disciples, to judge both from the nature of the case, and from several notices which occur in the Gospel narrative, was not completely ended. Doubts still must have remained to be cleared up; apprehensions to be allayed; dim and shadowy hopes to be transformed into trustful expectation. And it is in accordance with this view that the services of

our Church, during the period between Easter and Whitsuntide, breathe a spirit of diffident hope, still tempered with a godly fear; differing, indeed, from that unmixed spirit of humiliation and penitence which is proper to the season of Lent, but also differing from the holy exultation, and cheerful confidence, which should spring up in those who commemorate the coming of the Comforter.

And, indeed, if there be any one period in the history of the early Church, in which the Church of all times may be expected especially to sympathise, and to draw from it spiritual lessons more numerous and more valuable than from any other, this would seem to be the one. The disciples at that time, with all the historical facts of the great scheme of Redemption before them, but as yet without that light which showed each of these in its true bearing; believers, but with a belief incomplete; zealous, but with a zeal not yet terror-proof; favoured with manifestations of their Lord, but even at the time of these scarcely able to credit the evidence of their own senses; these, I say, would appear to furnish, better than any others, the general type of the Church militant here on earth; a Church, of which the members are all believers in the great truths of Revelation, but of widely different degrees of

* See Luke xxiv. 31; John xxi. 12.