beforehand ... the glory that should follow.'

Now, my text is evidently the result of the former of these two
anticipations, viz. that Paul and his generation were probably to see
the coming of the Lord from heaven. And to him the thought that' the
night was far spent,' as the context says, 'and the day was at hand,'
underlay his most buoyant hope, and was the inspiration and
motive-spring of his most strenuous effort.

Now, our relation to the closing moments of our own earthly lives, to
the fact of death, is precisely the same as that of the Apostle and
his brethren to the coming of the Lord. We, too, stand in that
position of partial ignorance, and for us practically the words of my
text, and all their parallel words, point to how we should think of,
and how we should be affected by, the end to which we are coming. And
this is the grand characteristic of the Christian view of that last
solemn moment. 'Now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.'
So I would note, first of all, what these words teach us should be
the Christian view of our own end; and, second, to what conduct that
view should lead us.

I. The Christian view of death.

'Now is our salvation nearer.' We have to think away by faith and
hope all the grim externals of death, and to get to the heart of the
thing. And then everything that is repulsive, everything that makes
flesh and blood shrink, disappears and is evaporated, and beneath the
folds of his black garment, there is revealed God's last, sweetest,
most triumphant angel-messenger to Christian souls, the great,
strong, silent Angel of Death, and he carries in his hand the gift of
a full salvation. That is what our Apostle rose to the rapture of
beholding, when he knew that the thought of his surviving till Christ
came again must be put away, and when close to the last moment of his
life, he said, 'The Lord shall deliver me, and save me into His
everlasting kingdom.' What was the deliverance and being saved that
he expected and expresses in these words? Immunity from punishment?
Escape from the headsman's axe? Being 'delivered from the mouth of
the lion,' the persecuting fangs of the bloody Nero? By no means. He
knew that death was at hand, and he said, 'He will save me'--not from
it, but through it--'into His everlasting kingdom.' And so in the
words of my text we may say--though Paul did not mean them so--as we
see the distance between us, and that certain close, dwindling,
dwindling,