Many righteous before him had died for the truth, by the hands of the impious. The head of the forerunner had lately been seen in the palace of Herod, as the price of voluptuousness. Isaiah, by a grievous death, had rendered glory to God; and, notwithstanding his royal blood, his august birth was ineffectual in sheltering him from those persecutions which are always the recompense of truth and zeal. Many others have died for the sake of righteousness; but nature seemed not wholly interested in their sufferings; the dead forsook not their tombs, to come, and, as it were, reproach to the living their sacrilege; nothing, in any degree similar, had, as yet, appeared upon the earth.
Survey the rest of his mysteries; everywhere you will find traits which distinguish him from all other men. If he rise up from among the dead, besides that it is through his own efficiency, (which no eye had ever yet beheld,) it is not, like so many others, who had been raised up through the ministry of the prophets, to return once more into the empire of death: he arises, never more to die; and, even here below, he receives an immortal life, which is what had never yet been accorded to any creature.
If he is carried up into heaven, it is not in a flaming chariot that he vanishes in the twinkling of an eye; he ascends with majesty, and allows all leisure to his affectionate disciples to worship him, and to accompany their divine Master with their eyes and their homages. The angels, as if to receive him into his empire, come to greet this King of Glory and comfort the affliction of the disciples, by promising him once more to the earth, surrounded with glory and immortality. All here announces the God of heaven, who returns to the place from whence he came, and who goes to resume the possession of his own glory; at least, every thing inclines men to believe so.
And, in truth, my brethren, when Elijah is taken up to heaven in a fiery chariot, a single disciple is the only spectator of that miraculous ascension; it takes place in a retired spot, removed from the view of the other children of the prophets, who, perhaps more credulous and less enlightened than Eliseus, might have been inclined to render divine honours to that miraculous man. But Jesus Christ surrounded with glory, mounts up to heaven before the eyes of five hundred disciples: the weakest and those who are least confirmed in the faith of his resurrection, are the first who are invited to the holy mountain: nothing is dreaded from their credulity: on the contrary, their adorations are equally permitted as their regrets and tears; and a life full of prodigies, till then so unheard-of on the earth, is at last terminated by a circumstance still more wonderful, and sufficient of itself to make him to be regarded as a God, and to immortalize error and idolatry among men.
In effect, if the pagan ages, in order to justify the ridiculous and impious homages which they paid to their legislators, to the founders of empires, and to other celebrated men, gave it out, in their historians and poets, that these heroes were not dead, but had only disappeared from the earth; and that, being of the same nature
