discern both good and evil. Their whole spirit and soul and body are preserved blameless. They are the children of light. They watch, pray, work, and are sober. They have put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. They edify one another, are at peace among themselves, and abstain from all appearance of evil. They are cultured in the highest and best sense, and are fitted to enter, in God's own time, upon the study and prac tice of the etiquette of heaven. THE CONSUMMATION. He who neglects his duty to God, his neighbor, or himself, does not live to the highest and noblest purpose. Life is most commendable when it presents in the most practical way the traits of obedience, brotherly kindness, and full-orbed personal piety. For ourselves we need perfect control of all our propensities and passions, for our neighbor we require the largest charity, and for God the deepest reverence and humility. These three graces of the Christian life are so essential to the prosperity of the individual, and to society as a whole, that the absence of any of them is a fatal defect of character, a break in the chain that links us to the power that works for righteousness. Nothing jars the world's harmony like a break in the ranks of Christian and social order. A great army soon becomes demoralized when discipline is lax, and soldiers fall out of the ranks as they please. One turbulent spirit will disturb the calmest organization. There must be order, uprightness, self-control. Were every man to keep his own life right, what a state of concord would be found in every community, city, state, nation, and in the world! Order is heaven's first law, and therefore heaven would begin below if society presented perfect order. But society presents no such order. Many live as they should, and many more live in every way but as they should. Society being thus disjointed, charity and brotherly help are required. Were none to repair the breaches, the walls of the social kingdom would soon be demolished. Were all to hate, and none to love, anarchy would speedily create a reign of terror, and sweep society from the earth. Charity is so excellent that, though but few exercise it, many partake of its benefits. Thus it is that a little gospel leaven tends to leaven the whole lump. Take away the remnant of Christian charity, and life loses its value, and the world its attraction. If humanity contain any thing sweet and beautiful it is harmonious social intercourse, where each is another's counselor, and all one another's friends. Grace in the heart alone develops this ideal. First pure, then peaceable. In point of order, loving God with all the heart goes before loving our neighbor as ourselves. Perfect love to God and man casteth out all fear, for where such love abounds no offense is ever given, and no retaliation ever feared. To do each other good is then the dominant passion. Love accepts the will for the deed when the executive powers fail, and thus people of all ages live in harmony, and are blest together in the holiest communion. A perfect realization of such social order would be a fulfillment of God's plan of redemption. Heaven would draw near to earth, and there would be but a step betwixt mortal life and eternal glory. Angels would fly the rounds of human life, and find in mankind congenial companionships for heavenly communion. God would smile upon the race, and own that the treasure lost in Eden had been restored to its rightful owner, and earth would once more be esteemed a paradise. Peace would well up from every throat, and serenity sit enthroned on every brow. Death would lose his terror, and Satan be shorn of his power. Christ would reign supreme, and the new heavens and the new earth, in all their transcendent glory, would speedily be ushered in. The Son would then deliver up all things unto the Father, and God would rule over all and in all. Part IX. WHAT TO BELIEVE CONCERNING THE FUTURE STATE. OUR DEATH. UR earthly existence ends in death. The body then rests in sleep. (John xi, 11; Acts vii, 60; 1 Cor. xv, 6, 18, 20.) The parellel between death and sleep is not perfect, since in death the body suffers decay and can not awake. But the Bible employs the figure, and hence there must be points of resemblance strictly accurate. Death resembles sleep in that the body is then at rest, and shall awake in the resurrection morn. It is appointed unto men once to die. The laws of life appear to provide for death. "Living is dying, since we are made of dust." (Professor Hyde.) "Dying is that breakdown in an organism which throws it out of correspondence with some necessary part of the environment." (Professor Drummond.) Physical death may have existed before sin, but sin makes it terrible. It is not death itself that humanity so much fears, as what is beyond death. Death is not death to the soul. The idea that death ends all is not of faith, but despair. The Bible teaches that the soul survives the shock of death, and lives on in conscious existence. In death the spirit returns to God who gave it. It departs from the body, but it is present with the Lord. (Read Eccl. xii, 7; Luke xxiii, 46; Acts vii, 59; 2 Cor. v, 8; Phil. i, 23.) There is a death which is the wages of sin. This death is spiritual, and may be eternal. To deliver mankind from this death Jesus gave his life. Spiritual death begins with the first act of sin, and culminates when sin has absolute dominion and the soul is "past hope." Eternal death begins when the soul thus bound by sin, unpardoned and unredeemed, is separated from the body by physical death. Properly speaking, it is not eternal death, but eternal punishment. (Matt. xxv, 46; Rom. vi, 23.) There is no form of death which is absolute in the sense of annihilation. The words "perish," "destruction," and so on, are to be understood morally, not ontologically. "How can the spirit be reduced to utter nothingness? The extinction of hope may lead to the hope of extinction. But science can talk only of the continuity and conservation of forces. It knows nothing of matter which is decomposed in the sense of being literally destroyed, and nothing of spirit as distinct from matter which ever loses its identity or activity. We look in vain for evidence that any being will be blotted out of being." (Professor J. T. Hyde.) "The essence of death does not consist in the extinction of the man, but far rather in the fact of its depriving him of what he might have had in and through his life, and thus in forming a direct antithesis to life, so far as life is to the man a possession and a blessing." (Cremer.) Death to the good is not a terror. The Christian can exclaim, "O death! where is thy sting?" which is only another way of saying, "Thou hast no sting." Christ hath abolished the sting of death. Millions of death-beds, since Jesus led the way, have been cheered and gladdened-made even the gate of heaven. Some suffer great pain in their last sickness, but die painlessly and in peace; some appear to suffer little, and also die in triumph. Some linger many weeks; others go in haste. None of us can fix upon the closing scene we most admire, and say: "Such shall be my departure." We can not anticipate the nature of the disease, or the circumstances of our last illness, so as to form any opinion as to the manner of our death. But this we can say: "I will make sure of a living interest in Christ, by casting myself in entire self-renouncing faith on his mercy, and I will hold fast, day by day, the beginning of my confidence steadfast unto the end." We can do no more; to do this is enough. We shall thus find grace equal to the hour. "The so-called agony can never be more formidable than when the brain is the last to go, and the mind preserves to the end a rational cognizance of the state of the body. Yet persons thus situated commonly attest that there are few things in life less painful than its close." To many pious people death appears more terrible than it is. "The pains, the groans, the dying strife, Fright our approaching souls away; And we shrink back again to life, Fond of our prison and our clay." Providence generally deals kindly with us in handing us down to the last hour and the closing scene. As a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. He will manage our death even as graciously as he manages our other affairs. We shall wonder, when he has borne us through the valley of shades, how slight a thing the operation really was. It will appear like many things we have known, formidable in apprehension, but easy in experience. "If I had strength enough to hold a pen," said William Hunter, "I would write how easy and delightful it is to die." "If this be dying," said the niece of Newton of Olney, "it is a pleasant thing to die." "If this be dying," said Lady Glenorchy, "it is the easiest thing imaginable." "I did not suppose it was so sweet to die," said Francis Saurez, the Spanish theologian. An agreeable surprise was They expected the stream the prevailing sentiment with them all. to terminate in the dash of the torrent, and they found it was losing itself in the gentlest current. The Rev. S. Graves, D. D., has shown that "the event we call death has two aspects-two very different sides: an upper and a lower; and we see only the lower. God and the angels, and 'the spirits of the just made perfect' perhaps, see the upper side. 'It is not death to fling Aside this weary load; And rise on strong exultant wing "That is indeed death-what we call death; but it is the upper side of it. Life, in common simile, is a journey, with staff and worn sandal and dusty garments. Death, the death of a true Christian, is reaching home, and resting and rejoicing with the loved ones 'gone before.' "Life is a voyage-so we often call it-through which we must tack and beat and buffet the storms and breast the whelming waves. Death is dropping the anchor and furling the sail in the harbor. "We crossed the Atlantic in December, and met little else except storms and head-winds all the way. How joyfully loomed the homehills, though covered with snow; and how the heart beat with a great swell of thankfulness when we steamed through the Narrows into the harbor of New York, and moored at the home dock! Such is death, as seen from above. "Balloonists sometimes see the upper side of a dark and rainy day. How gloriously different from the dreary, drizzly under side! |