ws of your souls that look
heavenwards; and of God, and all the lofty starry realities that cluster
round Him, you are as unconscious as the corpse upon its bier is of the
sunshine that plays upon its pallid features, or of the dew that falls
on its stiffened limbs. Dead, because of sin--is that exaggeration? Is
it exaggeration which charges all but absolute unconsciousness of
spiritual realities upon worldly men like some of you?

And, then, take another illustration. Another of the signatures of death
is inactivity. And oh! what faculties in some of my friends listening to
me now are shrivelled and all but extinct! They are dormant, at any
rate, to use another word, for the death of my text is not so absolute a
death but that a resurrection is possible, and so _dormant_ comes to
express pretty nearly the same thing. Faculties of service, of
enthusiasm, of life for God, of noble obedience to Him--what have you
done with them? Left them there until they have stiffened like an unused
lock, or rusted like the hinges of an unopened door; and you are as
little active in all the noblest activities of spirit, which are
activities in submission to and dependence upon Him, as if you were laid
in your coffin with your idle hands crossed for evermore upon an
unheaving breast.

There is another illustration that I may suggest for a moment. Decay is
another characteristic and signature of death. And your best self, in
some of you, is rotting to corruption by sin.

Ay! Dear brethren, when we think of these tragedies of suicide that are
going on in thousands of men round about us to-day, it seems to me as if
the metaphor and the reality were reversed; and instead of saying that
my text is a violent metaphor, transferring the facts of material death
and corruption to the spiritual realm, I am almost disposed to say it is
the other way about, and the real death is the death of the spirit; and
the outer dissolution and unconsciousness and inactivity of the material
body is only a kind of parable to preach to men what are the awful
invisible facts ever associated with the fact of transgression.

There are three lives possible for each of us; two of them involuntary,
the third requiring our consent and effort, but all of them sustained by
the same cause. The first of them is that which we call life, the
activity and the consciousness of the bodily frame; and that continues
as long as the power of God keeps the body in life. When He wit