redeemed, Christ is present, in His consciousness of its
circumstances, and in the activity of His influence, and in whatsoever
other incomprehensible and unspeakable mode Omnipresence belongs to a
divine Person. So that He is with us most really, though the visible,
bodily Form is no longer by our sides.

That Presence which survives, which is true for us here to-day, may be
a far better and more blessed and real thing than the presence of the
mere bodily Form in which He once dwelt. We may have lost something by
His going away in visible form; I doubt whether we have. We have lost
the manifestation of Him to the sense, but we have gained the
manifestation of Him to the spirit. And just as the great men, who are
only men, need to die and go away in order to be measured in their
true magnitude and understood in their true glory; just as when a man
is in amongst the mountains, he cannot tell which peak is the dominant
one, but when he gets away a little space across the sea and looks
back, distance helps to measure magnitude and reveal the sovereign
summit which towers above all the rest, so, looking back across the
ages with the foreground between us and Him of the history of the
Christian Church ever since, and noticing how other heights have sunk
beneath the waves and have been wrapped in clouds and have disappeared
behind the great round of the earth, we can tell how high this One is;
and know better than they knew who it is that moves amongst men in
'the form of a servant,' even the Bridegroom of the Church and of the
world. 'It is expedient for you that I go away,' and Christ is, or
ought to be, nearer to us to-day in all that constitutes real
nearness, in our apprehension of His essential character, in our
reception of His holiest influences, than He ever was to them who
walked beside Him on the earth.