ity, doomed by the persistent refusal to recognise the Divine voice. But
we are here on still deeper ground. The true explanation of the fourth
word is to be found in that great principle which St. Paul has laid down
in a familiar, but little understood, sentence: "the sting of death is
sin."

The simplest and most obvious meaning of these words is that, whatever be
the physiological meaning and necessity of human death, its peculiar
horror and dread, that which makes death to be what it is for us, is to
be found in sin, in the separation of man from God.

Now that horror consists, ultimately, in the fact that death is the
analogue, or, in New Testament language, the "sign," of what sin
is--separation. If sin is, essentially, the violent and unnatural
separation of man, by his own act, from his spiritual environment, death
is clearly the separation--and, _as our sins have made it_, the violent
and unnatural separation of man from all that has hitherto been his
world. It may be, that the final, extremest pang of death is the supreme
moment of agony, when we feel that we are being made to let go our hold
on reality, are slipping back into what, in our consciousness of it, must
appear like nothingness, the mere blank negation of being. Here, then,
we have the explanation of this awful cry. He Who came "for our
salvation" into a world disordered by sin, willed so to identify Himself
with our experience, as to realise death, not as it might have been, but
as man had made it, the very sign and symbol of man's sin, of his
separation from God. That moment of extreme mental anguish wrung from
His lips the Cry, not of "dereliction," but of faith triumphing even in
the moment when He "tasted death" as sin's most bitter fruit, "_My_ God,
why didst Thou forsake Me?"

What this view involves is briefly

(i) Death is an experience natural to man.

(ii) Sin has added to this natural experience a peculiar agony, a
"sting."

(iii) This "sting" is an experience of utter isolation at some moment in
the process of death, the feeling that one is being violently rent away
from one's clinging hold of existence.

(iv) This "sting" is due to the disorder sin has introduced into the
constitution of the world and of man.

(v) In virtue of this, death has become the "sign" in the "natural"
world of what sin is in the spiritual.

(vi) Our Blessed Lord so utterly identified Himself with our experience,
with the internal as wel