the sins of each single soul. Yours and mine and all our
fellows' were there. Guilt and fear and loneliness, and all the other
evils that beset men because they have departed from the living God, are
floated away

'By the water and the blood
From Thy wounded side which flowed';

and as the context teaches us, it is because He died for us that He is
our Lord, and because He died for every man that He is every man's
Master and King.

II. Note, secondly, the transformation of our lives and deaths affected
thereby.

You may remember that, in my introductory remarks, I pointed out the
double application of that antithesis of waking or sleeping in the
context as referring in one case to the fact of physical life or death,
and in the other to the fact of moral engrossment with the slumbering
influences of the present, or of Christian vigilance. I carry some
allusion to both of these ideas in the remarks that I have to make.

Through Jesus Christ life may be quickened into watchfulness. It is not
enough to take waking as meaning living, for you may turn the metaphor
round and say about a great many men that living means dreamy sleeping.
Paul speaks in the preceding verses of 'others' than Christians as being
asleep, and their lives as one long debauch and slumber in the night.
Whilst, in contrast with physical death, physical life may be called
'waking'; the condition of thousands of men, in regard to all the higher
faculties, activities, and realities of being, is that of
somnambulists--they are walking indeed, but they are walking in their
sleep. Just as a man fast asleep knows nothing of the realities round
him; just as he is swallowed up in his own dreams, so many walk in a
vain show. Their highest faculties are dormant; the only real things do
not touch them, and their eyes are closed to these. They live in a
region of illusions which will pass away at cock-crowing, and leave them
desolate. For some of us here living is only a distempered sleep,
troubled by dreams which, whether they be pleasant or bitter, equally
lack roots in the permanent realities to which we shall wake some day.
But if we hold by Jesus Christ, who died for us, and let His love
constrain us, His Cross quicken us, and the might of His great sacrifice
touch us, and the blood of sprinkling be applied to our eyeballs as an
eye-salve, that we may see, we shall wake from our opiate sleep--though
it may be as deep as if the sky rai