able. For such a
theory reduces human actions to mechanical results, and shatters all
responsibility. Man is more than his dwelling-place. You crush a
shell on the beach with your heel, and you slay its tiny inhabitant.
But you can pull down the tent, and pluck up its pegs, and roll up
its canvas, and put it away in a dark corner, and the tenant is
untouched. The foolish senses crown Death as last, and lord of all.
But wisdom says, 'Life and thought have gone away side by side,
leaving doors and windows wide,' and that is all that has happened.

Still further, my text suggests that to the Christian soul the
departure from the one house is the entrance into the other. The home
has been the body; the home is now to be Jesus Christ. And very
beautiful and significant with meanings, which only experience will
fully unfold, is the representation that the Lord Christ Himself
assumes the place which the bodily environment has hitherto held.

That teaches us, at all events, that there is a new depth and
closeness of union with Jesus waiting the Christian soul, when it
lays aside the separating film of flesh. Here the bodily
organisation, with its limitations, necessarily shuts us off from the
closeness of intercourse which is possible for a naked soul. We know
not how much separation may depend upon the immersing of the spirit
in the fleshly tabernacle, but this we know, that, though here and
now, by faith which dominates sense, souls can live in Christ even
whilst they live in the body; yet there shall come a form of union so
much more close, intimate, all-pervading, and all-encircling, as that
the present union with Him by faith, precious as it is, shall be, as
the Apostle calls it in our context, 'absence from the Lord.' 'We
have to be discharged,' says an old thinker, 'of a great deal of what
we call body, and then we shall be more truly ourselves,' and more
truly united to Him who, if we are Christian people at all, is the
self of ourselves and the life of our lives. No man knows how close
he can nestle to the bosom of Christ when the film of flesh is rent
away. Just as when in some crowded street of a great city some grimy
building is pulled down, a sudden daylight fills the vacant space,
and all the site that had been shut out from the sky for many years
is drenched in sunshine, so when 'the earthly house of this
tabernacle' is ruinated and falls, the light will flood the place
where it stood, and to be 'absent from th