Notice, finally, that it was expedient for the fortifying of faith. This is immeasurably important. Jesus knew the terrible hazards His cause would have to meet. He foresaw the deadly menace of the ruthless principalities and powers. He knew that history, right on to the end of time, would fling the frightful challenge of the trumpeting success of fraud and force and arrogant wickedness full in the face of those who trusted in righteousness and truth and love. Is not this very thing happening today on a gigantic scale? How was faith to be fortified to stand the strain? How was the assurance to be given that goodness, justice and love were not abortive, fanciful ideals, Vanity of vanities’, as sometimes to our bewildered minds they appear to be, but ultimate values destined to prevail, enthroned eternally at the right hand of power? One thing was needful — to know that Jesus, on whom all the concentrated evil of the world had wreaked its uttermost will, had emerged triumphant and was at the right hand of God. This, as the disciples came to see, was the meaning of His going from them. ‘He ascended up on high, He led captivity captive.’

For those men, that changed the whole aspect of the world. Where once they might have lost heart and cringed in dismal fear, now they could march like conquerors, knowing that Christ had already conquered. For if evil, at the very point where it had put forth its maximum force in one crowning deed of consummate iniquity — its crucifying of Christ — had met its match, and lost the battle, and been routed utterly, what more had they to fear? Or indeed, what have any of us to fear, even in the darkest days when criminal wickedness rides prosperously and righteousness seems trampled in the dust? Christ crucified and ascended—there is the ultimate reality: and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

It is a glorious phrase—‘He led captivity captive.’ The very triumphs of His foes, it means, He used for their defeat. He compelled their dark achievements to subserve His ends, not theirs. They nailed Him to the tree, not knowing that by that very act they were bringing the world to His feet. They gave Him a cross, not guessing that He would make it a throne. They flung Him outside the gates to die, not knowing that in that very moment they were lifting up all the gates of the universe, to let the King come in. They thought to root out His doctrines, not understanding that they were implanting imperishably in the hearts of’ men the very name they intended to destroy. They thought they had God with His back to the wall, pinned and helpless and defeated: they did not know that it was God Himself who had tracked them down. He did not conquer in spite of the dark mystery of evil. He conquered through it. He led captivity itself captive.

When your hear a Richard Lovelace singing

‘Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage,’

what do you say? You say there is a man who has not been mastered by his evil fate: he has mastered it. He is leading captivity captive. When you think of John Bunyan incarcerated in Bedford gaol, and out of that bitter bondage bringing the deathless beauty of the Pilgrim* s Progress; or of Father Damien contracting leprosy on his lonely isle, and actually transforming that dread disease from a crushing liability to a glorious asset in the service of his Master; or of Josephine Butler broken-hearted by a dear child’s death, and making that broken heart a cradle of love for hundreds of unloved lives; or of Helen Keller, shut in by a midnight of physical darkness, and using that darkness as a holy shrine for communion with the living God—when you think of such as these, what can you say but that they have taken the wrecking circumstances of life, and transfigured them into means of grace and ladders up to heaven? They have turned the tables on fate. They have vanquished their victors. They have led captivity captive.

How much more is that true of Him who has given us ‘rest by His sorrow, and life by His death’! No wonder the Christian Creed, facing the finished work of Jesus, defies the legions of evil to do their worst. Christ’s is the victory, the power and the glory: and the doom of all the godlessness, the barbarity, the lying, arrogant unrighteousness which now bestride the world was written on the day when Jesus defeated the powers of darkness once for a!l and led captivity captive. It’ was to make this manifest, not, only to His disciples but to every succeeding generation, that from His sojourn on the earth He passed to the ‘right hand of God the Father. It was expedient—for the fortifying of faith—that He went away.

Why then art thou cast down, O my soul? Why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God! Defeat the darkness by the vision of the ascended Christ!

‘ “Lift up your hearts!” We lift them, Lord, to Thee;

Here at Thy feet none other may we see:

“‘Lift up your hearts!” E’en so, with one accord,

We lift them up, we lift them to the Lord.

Above the level of the f ormer years,

The mire of sin, the slough of guilty fears,

The mist of doubt, the blight of love’s decay,

O Lord of Light, lift all our hearts today!

Then, as the trumpet-call in after years

“”Lift up your hearts!” rings pealing in our ears,

Still shall those hearts respond with full accord,

“We lift them up, we lift them to the Lord!” ’