e body' shall be to be
'present with the Lord.'

May we go a step further and suggest that, perhaps, in the bold
metaphor of my text, there is an answer to the questions which so
often rack loving and parted hearts? 'Do the dead know aught of what
affects us here? and can they do aught but gaze on Him, and love, and
rest?' If it be that there is any such analogy as seems to be dimly
shadowed in my text, between the relation of the body on earth to the
spirit that inhabits it, and that of Jesus Christ to him who dwells
in Him, and is clothed by Him, then it may be that, as the flesh, so
the Christ transmits to the spirit that has Him for its home
impressions from the outside world, and affords a means of action
upon that world. Christ may be, if I might so say, the sensorium of
the disembodied spirit; and Christ may be the hand of the man who
hath no other instrument by which to express himself. But all that is
fancy perhaps, speculation certainly; and yet there seems to be a
shadow of a foundation for at least entertaining the possibility of
such a thought as that Jesus is the means of knowing and the means of
acting to those who rest from their labours in Him, and dwell in
peace in His arms. But be that as it may, the reality of a close
communion and encircling by the felt presence of Jesus Christ, which,
in its blessed closeness, will make the closest communion here seem
to be obscure, is certainly declared in the words before us.

Then this transition is regarded in my text as being the work of a
moment. It is not a long journey of which the beginning is 'to go
_from_ home, from the body,' and the end is 'to _go_ home, to the
Lord.' But it is one and the same motion which, looked at from the
one side, is departure, and looked at from the other is arrival. The
old saying has it, 'there is but a step between me and death.' The
truth is, there is but a step between me and _life_. The mighty angel
in the Apocalypse, that stood with one foot on the firm land and the
other on the boundless ocean, is but the type of the spirit in the
brief moment of transition, when the consciousness of two worlds
blends, and it is clothed upon with the house which is from heaven,
in the very act of stripping off the earthly house of this
tabernacle.

Nor need I remind you, I suppose, in more than a sentence, that this
transition obviously leads into a state of conscious communion with
Jesus Christ. The dreary figment of an unconscious