rous and God-directed as it ought to be. They drop into the
background, and sometimes are lost to sight altogether. Remember how
this Apostle, when he does think about death, looks at it with--I was
going to quote words which may strike you as being inappropriate--'a
frolic welcome'; how, at all events, he is neither a bit afraid of
it, nor does he see in it anything from which to shrink. He speaks of
being with Christ, which is far better; 'absent from the body,
present with the Lord'; 'the dissolution of the earthly house of this
tabernacle'--the tumbling down of the old clay cottage in order that
a stately palace of marble and precious stones may be reared upon its
site; 'the hour of my departure is at hand; I have finished the
fight.' Peter, too, chimes in with his words: 'My exodus; my
departure,' and both of the two are looking, if not longingly, at all
events without a tremor of the eyelid, into the very eyeballs of the
messenger whom most men feel so hideous. Is it not a wonderful gift
to Christian souls that by faith in Jesus Christ, the realm in which
their hope can expatiate is more than doubled, and annexes the dim
lands beyond the frontier of death? Dear friends, if we are living in
Christ, the thought of the end and that here we are absent from home,
ought to be infinitely sweet, of whatever superficial terrors this
poor, shrinking flesh may still be conscious. And I am sure that the
nearer we get to our Saviour, and the more we realise the joyous
possession of salvation as already ours, and the more we are
conscious of the expanding of that gift in our hearts, the more we
shall be delivered from that fear of death which makes men all their
'lifetime subject to bondage.' So I beseech you to aim at this, that,
when you look forward, the furthest thing you see on the horizon of
earth may be that great Angel of Death coming to save you into the
everlasting kingdom.

Now, just a word about

II. The conduct to which such a hope should incite.

The Apostle puts it very plainly in the context, and we need but
expand in a word or two what he teaches us there. 'And that knowing
the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep, for now is
our salvation nearer than when we believed.' To what does he refer by
'that'? The whole of the practical exhortations to a Christian life
which have been given before. Everything that is duty becomes tenfold
more stringent and imperative when we apprehend the true meanin