XLV. Change in Death through the Death of Christ. "There is no death: what seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, Whose portal we call death." LONGFELLOW. THE language of the Scriptures, when they speak of the effect of the death of Christ on the death of men, is the intensest and the broadest. He has "abolished" and destroyed" death; and "whosoever believeth in Him shall never die;" "shall not taste of death." Still, bodily death reigns over all men, and Christ endured it, and from it no one of His servants is exempted. It must be that death has two senses; that in which it is, through Christ, at an end; and that in which it remains. The sense in which it remains is before our eyes, and will soon be our experience. The sense in which it is, through Christ, at an end, can best be comprehended by reverting to the view of death as it would have been if Christ had not died. It would have been the extinction of all which makes life life. The body would have been dissolved, "dust to dust." The spirit would have passed, either into nothingness, or into wretchedness without remedy. The separation itself could not be without mighty woe, when, hopeless and comfortless, body and soul were torn for ever asunder. Through Christ, it was decreed that the body should be reanimated; "all should be made alive." Through Christ, the soul, whatever else might be its allotment, should share the same immortal existence. For those who should die before the age of actual sin, and for those who should embrace and hold fast the holy hope in Christ, the world to which death is the passage should be light and glory. The passage itself could no longer be what it had else been; for, the valley on each side stretches up, as it were, into the rough mountain pass between; and when both valleys smile, the one an earthly garden, the other a heavenly Paradise, the pass between them must be less gloomy and less toilsome. But the blessing, the one stupendous blessing, of redemption, has made even of this life, and for the evil and the good alike, another scene than must have been, had the curse been without remedy. The sun shines and the rains descend on all alike; all see the beauty, and hear the music of nature; to all, the senses are the avenues of delight, and the exercise of the powers is a happiness; and all have exquisite joy in the fellowship of man with man, under a multitude of relations. Life is gladdened, and death, as the mere close of life, is alleviated, for all, through that benefit of the redemption which may be separated from all its spiritual and eternal issues. Men do not die as they must have died, had the sentence been simply, and without qualification, fulfilled. Apart entirely from all inward anguish, death is not dreadful. When the infant and the idiot, or those whose senses at the hour of death are immersed in sleep, or those whose cerebral organs have been oppressed and stupified, sink into its arms, it has no terrors. When the senses and the mind are all awake, it is felt that nothing but alarm of conscience should make the soul recoil from a change which otherwise can bring no peril. Those are deceived, unless they are the victims of a morbid, nervous timidity, who imagine that they are afraid to die, but not afraid to be dead. A mind in health could not so shrink from what must be a mere transition, if the state into which it shall be borne by that transition were utterly without power to excite anxious foreboding. It is the conscience that is awake and agitated; and its apprehensions can only be removed through a persuasion which, whether true or false, shall be adapted to itself, and shall seem to disclose safety beyond the grave. But, while this terror is truly taken away only through the Redeemer, and through Him only for such as have not rejected His love, other terrors of the mere bodily dissolution have been, like the perpetuity of corporeal death, taken away, at least in their most awful forms, for all human creatures. Only He who was sinless tasted all the bitterness of death; and sinners taste it no more, except it proceed from the consciousness of guilt unforgiven, and therefore of danger beyond. That consciousness could not be His; all else which is in death He exhausted, and the world was relieved. Hence, when the terrors of conscience are allayed, men go down into death and meet the natural change with a tranquillity so common that it cannot be deemed difficult. The terrors of conscience are unfelt by the infant, the idiot, the insensible; they are often braved by the hardened; they are sometimes soothed in the heedless; they are generally suppressed in the unbelieving; and they are banished from the breast of steadfast, humble, hopeful piety. But, in whatever manner these are escaped, the death of Jesus has removed, or wonderfully softened, for all mankind, those other terrors which surrounded the sentence of death; just as His mediation, through which all blessings flow to men, removed or softened the sorrows which were mingled by the same sentence with the cup of the living. When, watched by affection and relieved by science, every pain soothed, and every tie gently loosed, the dying mortal sinks as if into a sleep, whose beginning, perhaps, is hardly discerned, this is the utmost of the simply earthly relaxation of the common sentence; a relaxation which, through the death of Jesus, has been granted to our universal nature. XLVI. Christian Prospect of Death. "I have a sin of fear, that, when I've spun I fear no more." DONNE. THE incorporation of the Son of God with our nature, and His endurance of death for our sake, removed, incidentally we might almost say, an innumerable host of evils; and this train of effects reached even to the gate of eternity. But there, the soul passes on, from trial to retribution, bearing with it whatever has been acquired through its own inward and voluntary union with its Saviour. Death, as a physical or mental change, is greatly lightened to all by the death of Christ; death, as an event in the life of the immortal spirit, is what it is rendered by the character which in this life that spirit has put on. The physical nature reaps, from the universal union with Him who assumed it, a physical immortality; the sensitive soul shared, for the same cause, a corresponding relief; but the spiritual nature must be spiritually united to Him with its own glad consent, that the spiritual victory which He has won may be its everlasting possession. This victory is signified at the deathbed of the believer. To faith, the triumph of the love of God in |