This sermon was preached by John Donne, Dean of St Paul's, London, on Easter Day, 1622
1
The dead hear not thunder, nor feel they an earthquake. If the cannon batter that church walls, in which they lie buried, it wakes not them, nor does it shake or affect them if that dust, which they are, be thrown out. But yet there is a voice which the dead will hear: the dead shall hear the voice of God (says the Son of God himself) and they that hear shall live. And that is the voice of our text. It is here called a clamour, a vociferation, a shout, and varied by our translators and expositors, according to the origination of the word to be clamor hortatorius, and suasorius, and jussorius, A voice that carries with it a penetration (all shall hear it), and a persuasion (all shall believe it, and be glad of it), and a power, command (all shall obey it). Since that voice at the Creation, fiat, Let there be a world, was never heard such a voice as this, Surgite mortui, Arise ye dead. That was spoken to that that was merely nothing, and this to them who in themselves shall have no co-operation, no concurrence to the hearing or answering this voice.
The power of this voice is exalted in that it is said to be the voice of an archangel. Though legions of angels, millions of angels shall be employed about the resurrection to collect their scattered dust and recompact their ruined bodies, yet those bodies so recompact, shall not be able to hear a voice. They shall be then such bodies as when they were laid down in the grave; when, though they were entire bodies, they could not hear the voice of the mourner. But this voice of the archangel shall enable them to hear. The archangel shall re-infuse the several souls into their bodies, and so they shall hear that voice, Surgite mortui, Arise ye that were dead, and they shall arise.
2
The hypocrite hath s being and, in God, but it is not with God, Qua co longe, With his lips he honours God, but removes his heart far from him. And God sends him after his heart, that he may keep him at that distance (as St. Gregory reads and interpretates that place of Esay) Redite praevaricatores ad cor, Return O sinners, follow your own heart, and then I am sure you and I shall never meet.
Our Saviour Christ delivers this distance plainly, Discedite a me, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire. Where the first part of the sentence is incomparably the heaviest, the departing worse than the fire. The intenseness of that fire, the air of that brimstone, the anguish of that worm, the discord of that howling and gnashing of teeth is no comparable, no considerable part of the torment, in respect of the privation of the sight of God, the banishment from the presence of God, an utter hopelessness, an utter impossibility of ever coming to that, which sustains the miserable in this world, that though I see no sun here, I shall see the Son of God there.
3
How barren a thing is arithmetic! (and yet arithmetic will tell you how many single grains of sand will fill this hollow vault to the firmament) How empty a thing is rhetoric! (and yet rhetoric will make absent and remote things present to your understanding) How weak a thing is poetry! (and yet poetry is a counterfeit creation and makes things that are not, as though they were) How infirm, how impotent ae all assistances if they be put to express this eternity!
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