live also.

Behold, then, life and death set before us; not remote, (if a few years
be, indeed, to be called remote,) but even now present before us; even
now suffered or enjoyed. Even now, we are alive unto God, or dead unto
God; and, as we are either the one or the other, so we are, in the
highest possible sense of the terms, alive or dead. In the highest
possible sense of the terms; but who can tell what that highest possible
sense of the terms is? So much has, indeed, been revealed to us, that we
know now that death means a conscious and perpetual death, as life means
a conscious and perpetual life. But greatly, indeed, do we deceive
ourselves, if we fancy that, by having thus much told us, we have also
risen to the infinite heights, or descended to the infinite depths,
contained in those little words, life and death. They are far higher,
and far deeper, than ever thought or fancy of man has reached to. But,
even on the first edge of either, at the visible beginnings of that
infinite ascent or descent, there is surely something which may give us
a foretaste of what is beyond. Even to us in this moral state, even to
you advanced but so short a way on your very earthly journey, life and
death have a meaning: to be dead unto God, or to be alive to him, are
things perceptibly different.

For, let me ask of those who think least of God, who are most separate
from him, and most without him, whether there is not now actually,
perceptibly, in their state, something of the coldness, the loneliness,
the fearfulness of death? I do not ask them whether they are made
unhappy by the fear of God's anger; of course they are not: for they who
fear God are not dead to him, nor he to them. The thought of him gives
them no disquiet at all; this is the very point we start from. But I
would ask them whether they know what it is to feel God's blessing. For
instance: we all of us have our troubles of some sort or other, our
disappointments, if not our sorrows. In these troubles, in these
disappointments,--I care not how small they may be,--have they known
what it is to feel that God's hand is over them; that these little
annoyances are but his fatherly correction; that he is all the time
loving us, and supporting us? In seasons of joy, such, as they taste
very often, have they known what it is to feel that they are tasting the
kindness of their heavenly Father, that their good things come from his
hand, and are but an infinitely slight fo