ged, and is
a friend. The two pictures are better than all the poor words that I
can say. It depends on the people to whom he comes, whether he comes
as a destroyer or as a helper. Of course, for all of us the mere
physical facts remain the same, the pangs and the pain, the slow
torture of the loosing of the bond, or the sharp agony of its
instantaneous rending apart. But we have gone but a very little way
into life and its experiences, if we have not learnt that identity of
circumstances may cover profound difference of essentials, and that
the same experiences may have wholly different messages and meanings
to two people who are equally implicated in them. Thus, while the
physical fact remains the same for all, the whole bearing of it may
so differ that Death to one man will be a Destroyer, while to another
it is a Friend.

For, if we come to analyse the thoughts of humanity about the last
act in human life on earth, what is it that makes the dread darkness
of death, which all men know, though they so seldom think of it? I
suppose, first of all, if we seek to question our feelings, that
which makes Death a foe to the ordinary experience is, that it is
like a step off the edge of a precipice in a fog; a step into a dim
condition of which the imagination can form no conception, because it
has no experience, and all imagination's pictures are painted with
pigments drawn from our past. Because it is impossible for a man to
have any clear vision of what it is that is coming to meet him, and
he cannot tell 'in that sleep what dreams may come,' he shrinks, as
we all shrink, from a step into the vast Inane, the dim Unknown. But
the Gospel comes and says, 'It _is_ a land of great darkness,' but
'To the people that sit in darkness a great light hath shined.'

'Our knowledge of that life is small,
The eye of faith is dim.'

But faith has an eye, and there is light, and this we can see--One
face whose brightness scatters all the gloom, One Person who has not
ceased to be the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His beams, even
in the darkness of the grave. Therefore, one at least of the
repellent features which, to the timorous heart, makes Death a foe,
is gone, when we know that the known Christ fills the Unknown.

Then, again, another of the elements, as I suppose, which constitute
the hostile aspect that Death assumes to most of us, is that it
apparently hales us away from all the wholesome activities and
occupations