Editorial April 10, 1909 Issue

"RISEN WITH CHRIST."

Annie M. Knott

We cannot better mark the forward march of thought in late years than by comparing the old material concept of the resurrection with the more spiritual sense of it which is largely held today. Not so long ago many believed that to be "risen with Christ" meant an experience which would come to the righteous after death, but there is nothing in St. Paul's wonderful epistle to the Colossians, in which this phrase appears, to warrant such an assumption. Here he tells his readers that the giving up of the gross vices in which they at one time lived was but a single step toward their own resurrection; and he adds, "But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth." He then reminds them that they "have put on the new man, which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him," and he urges them to put on "bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering," and above all else to "put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness." Paul does not stop with the virtues here enumerated, for there is really no stopping-place in one's spiritual progress, so he tells of peace and of thankfulness, and makes special application of the truth to all human relationships; nor does he forget to say, "Walk in wisdom toward them that are without," all of which wise counsel is surely as applicable to Christian Scientists today as if it had been written for their special benefit.

All that Paul here says points to the inevitable flowering and fruitage of character which must come if we are "risen with Christ." In Tennyson's wonderful poem, "The Holy Grail." we read of the famed hall at Camelot, with its "four great zones" of symbolic sculpture, of which the poet says.—

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