Excerpt from The Inward Light and Christ's Incarnation Lastly there was one great void - one vast blank - which nothing but God's love in His dear Son has ever filled - namely, the previous absence of all cer tainty of human conquest over death. The old Egyptians far surpassed the Jews in their ideas of future existence. But not even the Universal Inward Light had ever brought to them, or others, an assurance of victory over the Great Fear, until the introduction of the Great Hope through Christ's Resurrection. The noblest of the heathen, such as Plato and Socrates, had, at best, a faith which was as a guess, a conjecture. How sad their hopelessness under bereavement! But what a world of difference there is between the obituary inscriptions of the pagan Romans, - recording their sense of irreparable loss, at the decease of their most dear wives and daughters and sons, - as compared with the later Latin inscriptions on the Christian dead: In hope, - In peace, In Christ. It was not a mere change. It was a revolution in human history, even in the history, and life, and hope, and impulse, of the inmost souls of men. And what brings this hope still to the poor Buddhist, or Hindoo, or Chinese, or Japanese '2 Not the Inward Light, blessed, in its limited degree, though it be; not even that, but only the Gospel record of the historic Christ, the first-begotten from the dead, who, alone but finally, has conquered death and opened the Kingdom of Heaven, with its immortal youth and its glorious processes of eternal education, to all believers. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.