ery
divine.' It is permissible to take the opinion of those who are not
Christians into account, and to try to show them what good workmen
Christ can turn out. It is right, too, to cultivate a spirit of
independence, and to prefer a little earned to abundance given as a gift
or alms. Perhaps some of the Thessalonians were trying to turn brotherly
love to profit, and to live on their richer brethren. Such people infest
the Church at all times.

III. With what ease, like a soaring song-bird, the letter rises to the
lofty height of the next verses, and how the note becomes more musical,
and the style richer, more sonorous and majestic, with the changed
subject! From the workshop to the descending Lord and the voice of the
trumpet and the rising saints, what a leap, and yet how easily it is
made! Happy we if we keep the future glory and the present duty thus
side by side, and pass without jar from the one to the other!

The special point which Paul has in view must be kept well in mind. Some
of the Thessalonians seem to have been troubled, not by questions about
the Resurrection, as the Corinthians afterwards were, but by a curious
difficulty, namely, whether the dead saints would not be worse off at
Christ's coming than the living, and to that one point Paul addresses
himself. These verses are not a general revelation of the course of
events at that coming, or of the final condition of the glorified
saints, but an answer to the question, What is the relation between the
two halves of the Church, the dead and the living, in regard to their
participation in Christ's glory when He comes again? The question is
answered negatively in verse 15, positively in verses 16 and 17.

But, before considering them, note some other precious lessons taught
here. That sweet and consoling designation for the dead, 'them who sleep
in Jesus,' is Christ's gift to sorrowing hearts. No doubt, the idea is
found in pagan thinkers, but always with the sad addition, 'an eternal
sleep.' Men called death by that name in despair. The Christian calls it
so because he knows that sleep implies continuous existence, repose,
consciousness, and awaking. The sleepers are not dead, they will be
roused to refreshed activity one day.

We note how emphatically verse 14 brings out the thought that Jesus
died, since He suffered all the bitterness of death, not only in
physical torments, but in that awful sense of separation from God which
is the true death in de