he awakens hope and tenderness, he smooths away old differences, he
explains old misunderstandings.

Our Blessed Lord has already, over the grave of Lazarus, hinted that
this shall be so, so soon as He has consecrated death by His own dying.
_He that believeth in Me shall never die_. He, that is to say, who has
_died with Christ_, whose centre henceforward is in the supernatural,
simply no longer finds death to be what nature finds it. It no longer
makes for division but for union; it no longer imperils or ends life and
interest and possession, but releases them from risk and mortality.

Here, then, He deliberately and explicitly acts upon this truth. He once
raised Lazarus and the daughter of Jairus and the Widow's Son from the
dead, for death's sting could, at that time, be drawn in no other way;
but now that He Himself is _tasting death for every man_, He performs an
even more emphatically supernatural act and conquers death by submitting
to it instead of by commanding it. Life had already united, so far as
mortal life can unite, those two souls who loved Him and one another so
well. These two, since they knew Him so perfectly, knew each the other
too as perfectly as knowledge and sympathy can unite souls in this
life. But now the whole is to be raised a stage higher. They had already
been united on the living breast of Jesus; now, over His dead body, they
were to be made yet more one.

It is marvellous that, after so long, our imaginations should still be
so tormented and oppressed by the thought of death; that we should still
be so _without understanding_ that we think it morbid to be in love with
death, for it is far more morbid to be in fear of it. It is not that our
reason or our faith are at fault; it is only that that most active and
untamable faculty of ours, which we call imagination, has not yet