hdraws
His hand there comes what the senses call death. Then there is the
natural life of thinking, loving, willing, enjoying, sorrowing, and the
like, and that continues as long as He who is the life and light of men
breathes into them the breath of that life. And these two are lived or
died largely without the man's own consent or choice.

But there is a third life, when all that lower is lifted to God, and
thinking and willing and loving and enjoying and aspiring and trusting
and obeying, and all these natural faculties find their home and their
consecration and their immortality in Him. That life is only lived by
our own will and it is the true life, and the others are, as I said, but
parables, and envelopes, and vehicles, as it were, in which this life is
carried, that is more precious than they. In the physical realm,
separate the body from God, and it dies. In the natural conscious life,
separate the soul, as we call it, from God, and it dies. And in the
higher region, separate the spirit, which is the man grasping God, from
God, and he dies; and that is the real death. Both the others are
nothing in comparison with it.

It may co-exist with a large amount of intellectual and other forms of
activity, as we see all round about us, and that makes it only the more
ghastly and the sadder. You are full of energy in regard to all other
subjects, but smitten into torpor about the highest; ready to live, to
work, to enjoy, to think, to will, in all other directions, and utterly
unconscious and unconcerned, or all but utterly unconscious and
unconcerned, in regard to God.

Oh! a death which is co-existent with such feverish intensity of life as
the most of you are expending all the week at your business and your
daily pursuits is among the saddest of all the tragedies that angels are
called upon to weep over, and that men are fools enough to enact.
Brother! If the representation is a gloomy one, do not you think that it
is better to ask the question--Is it a true one? than, Is it a cheerful
one? I lay it upon your hearts that he that lives to God and with God is
alive to the centre as well as out to the finger tips and circumference
of his visible being. He that is dead to God is dead indeed whilst he
lives.

II. Now, notice, in the second place, the pitying love that looks down
on the cemetery.

'God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us.'
Thus the great truth that is taught us here, first