spend our time in eating and drinking, mean covetousness, ambition, and
the base pleasures of the flesh: we long after high and noble things,
which we cannot get on earth, or at best only in fragments, and at rare
moments; after the holiness and the blessedness of ourselves and our
fellow-creatures. But we have hope in Christ for the next life as well
as for this. Hope that in the next life He will give us power to
succeed, where we failed here; that He will enable us to be good and to
do good, and, if not to make others good (for there, we trust, all will
be good together), to enjoy the fulness of that pleasure for which we
have been longing on earth--the pleasure of seeing others good, as Christ
is good and perfect, as their Father in heaven is perfect.

To be good ourselves, and to live for ever in good company--ah my
friends, that is true bliss. If we cannot reach that after death, it
were better for us that death should make an end of us, and that when our
body decays in the grave we should be annihilated, and become nothing for
ever.

But Easter day says to us, If you labour to create good company in this
life, by trying to make other people round you good, you shall enjoy for
ever in the next world the good company which you have helped to make.
If you labour to make yourself good in this life, you shall enjoy the
fruit of your labour in the next life by being good, and, therefore,
blessed for ever. Easter day says, Your labour is not vanity and
vexation of spirit. It is solid work, which shall receive solid pay from
God hereafter. Easter day is a pledge--I may say a sacrament--from God
to us, that He will righteously reward all righteous work; and that,
therefore, it is worth any man's while to labour, to suffer, if need be
even to die, in trying to be good, noble, useful, self-sacrificing, as
Christ toiled and suffered and died and sacrificed Himself to do good.