joy is independent of all foes and all externals, 'and your joy no
man taketh from you.'

There are, then, two or three aspects of the Christian life as a glad
life which are set before us in these words, and to which I ask your
attention.

I. There is, first, the promise of a joy which is a transformed
sorrow.

'Your sorrow shall be turned into joy,' not merely that the one
emotion is substituted for the other, but that the one emotion, as it
were, becomes the other. This can only mean that _that_, which was
the cause of the one, reverses its action and becomes the cause of
the opposite. Of course the historical and immediate fulfilment of
these words lies in the double result of Christ's Cross upon His
servants. For part of three dreary days it was the occasion of their
sorrow, their panic, their despair; and then, all at once, when with
a bound the mighty fact of the resurrection dawned upon them, that
which had been the occasion for their deep grief, for their
apparently hopeless despair, suddenly became the occasion for a
rapture beyond their dreams, and a joy which would never pass. The
Cross of Christ, which for some few hours was pain, and all but ruin,
has ever since been the centre of the deepest gladness and confidence
of a thousand generations.

I do not need to remind you, I suppose, of the value, as a piece of
evidence of the historical veracity of the Gospel story, of this
sudden change and complete revolution in the sentiments and emotions
of that handful of disciples. What was it that lifted them out of the