LENT with all its ritualistic solemnity and stated fastings is over. Easter with its ornate display and customary feastings and jubilations is in the past. And what better is the world? Christian or not, Saxe expressed the truth,
"'Tis not the stubborn fast nor stated prayers
Which make us saints."
Not one day to afflict the soul, nor one week, nor six weeks, makes the soul one whit better in God's sight, tho all the time, like Simeon Stylites, the pillar saint, we batter the gates of heaven with "storms of prayer." It is only in the righteousness of God in Jesus Christ that we are righteous; only by simple childlike faith does that righteousness come into our soul, covering every iniquity, blotting out all sin; and, soul, God gives it "freely by His grace." It can not be purchased by fasting nor won by self-denial, nor gotten by prayer; it is the free gift of God in Christ Jesus. In all this we are not decrying fasting nor prayer; both are necessary to fleshly, spiritually insensate mortals, not for forty days in the year, but for three hundred and sixty-five. But neither the one nor the other will be counted current money for the purchase of the free gift of God.
The proper celebration of the resurrection of Christ is not in the observance of a day, and worse than all a heathen festival still saturated with its heathen name and fleshly customs. Jesus Christ rose from the dead not for one day nor for two days, but for eternity; and he who truly would celebrate that rising from the dead first dies to sin with Christ, is buried in baptism, and rises to walk in newness of life forevermore.
Men lose sight of a great truth of God when they memorialize it with a thing which has no connection with it. What has a day to do with the resurrection of Jesus? Of course, it was on some one day that He arose, but it came at a very time which is in dispute, when no mortal saw Him come forth. That rising from the dead occupied but a moment of time; but it stood for a great, eternal, living truth—that there was One who had broken the power of sin and death forevermore. And the only proper memorial, sign, emblem, of that, is not a day, either weekly or yearly, but a LIFE, beginning with baptism, and revealing to the world the power of a living Christ within, the power of God's righteousness by faith. Only so do we rightly celebrate or memorialize the risen Christ. It may be said of every form substituted by ritualism, howsoever impressive, as the angel said of the rock crypt of old, "He is not here; for He is risen."