he is not turning his face to
vacuity, but to a Face that looks on him with love, can believe that
anything can ever come to destroy that communion. What have faith,
love, aspiration, resignation, fellowship with God, to do with death?
They cannot be cut through with the stroke that destroys physical
life, any more than you can divide a sunbeam with a sword. It unites
again, and the impotent edge passes through and has effected nothing.
Death can shear asunder many bonds, but that invisible bond that
unites the soul to God is of adamant, against which his scythe is in
vain. Death is the grim porter that opens the door of a dark hole and
herds us into it as sheep are driven into a slaughter-house. But to
those who have learned what it is to lay a trusting hand in God's
hand, the grim porter is turned into the gentle damsel, who keeps the
door, and opens it for light and warmth and safety to the hunted
prisoner that has escaped from the dungeon of life. Death cannot
touch communion, and the consciousness of communion with God is the
earnest of the inheritance.

It is so for another reason also. All the results of the Divine
Spirit's sealing of the soul are manifestly incomplete, and as
manifestly tend towards completeness. The engine is clearly working
now at half-speed. It is obviously capable of much higher pressure
than it is going at now. Those powers in the Christian man can
plainly do a great deal more than they ever have done here, and are
meant to do a great deal more. Is this imperfect Christianity of
ours, our little faith so soon shattered, our little love so quickly
disproved, our faltering resolutions, our lame performances, our
earthward cleavings--are these things all that Jesus Christ's bitter
agony was for, and all that a Divine Spirit is able to make of us?
Manifestly, here is but a segment of the circle, in heaven is the
perfect round; and the imperfections, so far as life is concerned, in
the work of so obviously divine an Agent, cry aloud for a region
where tendency shall become result, and all that it was possible for
Him to make us we shall become. The road evidently leads upwards, and
round that sharp corner where the black rocks come so near each other
and our eyesight cannot travel, we may be sure it goes steadily up
still to the top of the pass, until it reaches 'the shining
table-lands whereof our God Himself is Sun and Moon,' and brings us
all to the city set on a hill.

And, further, that