and the spiritual lies--I feel perfectly free to
listen to another voice, the voice which tells me that life can subsist,
and that personal being can be as full--ay, fuller--apart altogether
from the material frame which here, and by our present experience, is
its necessary instrument. And though accepting all that physical
investigation can teach us, we can still maintain that its light does
not illumine the central obscurity; and that, after all, it still
remains true that round about the being of each man, as round about the
being of God, clouds and darkness roll,

'Life and thought have gone away,
Side by side,
Leaving door and window wide.'

That, and nothing more, is death--'My decease ... an entrance.'

Then, again, the combination of these two words suggests to us that the
one act, in the same moment, is both departure and arrival. There is not
a pin-point of space, not the millionth part of a second of time,
intervening between the two. There is no long journey to be taken. A man
in straits, and all but desperation, is recorded in the old Book to have
said: 'There is but a step between me and death.' Ah, there is but a
step between death and the Kingdom; and he that passes out at the same
moment passes in.

I need not say a word about theories which seem to me to have no basis
at all in our only source of information, which is Revelation; theories
which would interpose a long period of unconsciousness--though to the
man unconscious it be no period at all--between the act of departure and
that of entrance. Not so do I read the teaching of Scripture: 'This day
thou shalt be with Me in Paradise.' We pass out, and as those in the
vestibule of a presence-chamber have but to lift the curtain and find
themselves face to face with the king, so we, at one and the same
moment, depart and arrive.

Friends stand round the bed, and before they can tell by the undimmed
mirror that the last breath has been drawn, the saint is 'with Christ,
which is far better.' To depart _is_ to be with Him. There is a moment
in the life of every believing soul in which there strangely mingle the
lights of earth and the lights of heaven. As you see in dissolving
views, the one fades and the other consolidates. Like the mighty angel
in the Apocalypse, the dying man stands for a moment with one foot on
the earth and the other already laved and cleansed by the waters of that
'sea of glass mingled with fire wh