with as careless a step and as unshadowed a heart, perhaps even with as well-satisfied an idea that their duty is well done and over, so leaving us to face the inevitable moment alone. It may be that we are unable to speak to our dying at all of God because of the gathering mists of the river, which blind and numb the soul into unconsciousness. Then we can but clasp their cold hands in ours and pray that the Pitiful Christ, the Shepherd of Love, will be with them. So, the river passed, the steep ways of death climbed, and the gate reached, while we prayed the curtain has gently, silently, been drawn for one single instant; then, as quietly and suddenly, fallen behind them, and they are gone. One moment the lamp of life burned, even if feebly and uncertainly, behind the large eyes, unnaturally wide and open, as if in an expectancy that was almost a vision of the unknown, and though furrowed and drawn with the heavy touch of long and weary pain, the face wore at least some dimly-distant look of the life of the eternal peace. Another instant, and the light behind the eyes is quenched, the lines on the brow are smoothed away by an invisible touch; the tongue is silent, which, even in the pardonable querulousness of its complainings, would now be as the music of heaven to us. But there is a wide chasm instantly opened, which can never again be crossed by the feet of mutual intercourse. A change has come—the nameless change— for 'Death' is too passive a word to express the infinite activities of that moment of emancipation and life.* We are called the living; they, if they were Christ's, are rather the living who are entered upon life, the separated life, the Blessed Life, with its vast possibilities of love and its eternal embrace within the beautiful and Beatific Life of God. * Cf. Bishop Ellicott's article in the Contemporary Review, August, 1871 (What is Death ?'), where he traces the derivation of the word 'death' (p. 63, and note). Surely, then, we are, more truly than they, in that first moment of wild loss and sorrow, the dead. These may seem to hearts, that never broke, too passionate words. We appeal to hearts, whose hope and love have sickened and died when their loved ones went from them into the misty ways of death, and they will know them far less than true. The past, the dear sacred past, has in a moment died to us, and we are dead to it. How hollow the silent house is grown, where the white-faced dead lies upstairs, and our quiet footfall, as we creep to the door, where the beautiful presence, so strangely companionable, seems to awaken the footsteps of the blessed past, which reverberate and thrill in the soul with a dull weary ache, for that past can never live again! Yet the room, when we have gently locked the door, and we are alone with our dead, is become a most true sanctuary of peace, where we are, at least, relieved from the intrusions of the world. But how unendurable will be the monotony of life to us now! For time, which, they cruelly say, in its flight and passing shakes healing and balm from its wings (is it not the most intolerable thought that such grief as ours can ever be consoled?), can bring us, we are most sure, no heart's ease, only the long, long ache of waiting, and of loss unrelieved in hearts growing, every day, oh how passionately weary! Where, then, does the soul live that is gone from our love to God, when it has once passed through the shadows of the gate of death? Where is all its future life, now that its feet have crossed the borderland of perpetual twilight, though the stiffened feet upon the bed seem so infinitely still, and as if the coldness of the river had frozen them indeed? Let, now at last, the lips of the Undying Love, dying for our blessed dead and for us, make answer in those most comforting of words, spoken from the Cross to the penitent, who was slowly dying at His side. Hear how he gently says: To-day shalt thou be with Me in Paradise.' 'Lo, Thou art the Crucified, wounded with the thorn, smitten with the reed, and dost Thou promise Paradise ?' (cries an old Father :) 'Even so,' saith Christ, 'that all men may adore My power on the Tree.' 'Look not, then,' adds this ancient homily, with a very salutary emphasis,* 'to the Tree of wood, but to His power who so hangeth there.' Let us draw nearer and listen to these words of Jesus. The Body of God, with Its wounds and with the thorn-crown, Its betrothal garland, is still hanging on Its dreadful station of love and sorrow, and seems like a white marble statue in the paling light and amid the mists, that begin slowly to fall and to descend upon the Cross. Soon It shall be carried, only attended by the few that loved Him, down the hill, with its brown and trampled grass, to Its rest amid the spices in the new tomb, where It must lie alone, until the awaking from the sleep of death on the morning of the third day. But before He dies, and as if deaf to the reproaches, that still make loud and dreadful outcry, He will, in a sweet leisure from His own infinite griefs, lovingly breathe into the ear of this penitent soul the absolution, 'Thou shalt be with Me.'† * There is a very remarkable chapter (xxix.) in the 'Octavius' of Minucius Felix, one sentence of which we commend to the earnest attention of those who reverence Christian antiquity. He is replying to the heathen slander that the Christians worshipped the cross: 'Crosses, moreover, we neither worship nor wish for.' † Archbishop Trench has well observed, 'It is not "When Thou comest into Thy kingdom," as though Christ's kingdom could even in thought be contemplated as apart from Himself; but, "When Thou comest in Thy kingdom;" the words are correctly rendered in Matt. xvi. 28, "When Thou shalt appear as a King with all Thy royalties about Thee, the angels ten thousand times ten thousand with Thee, and Thyself the Centre of all." Christ does not and cannot come into His kingdom; He comes in it and with it, brings His kingdom with Him, and where He is, there is His kingdom too.'-'Studies in the Gospels,' p. 304. See, He opens the gate of Paradise, in death itself a King and Conqueror! Most truly did the Lord reign in this act of Kingly absolution 'from the Tree,'* as an early Christian hand has added in Psalm xcvi. 10, probably as a gloss or postill in the margin, from whence it found its way into some copies of the ancient text. His royal right and grandeur of grace never shone more brightly than from the Cross, the throne of His sorrow, for was this not the great Sacrifice of expiation? Of the mystery of the Divine Passion, as the gate of mercy for the return and re-entrance of man into the home and garden of God, St. Augustine has said very devoutly: 'Dost thou marvel that man may come to the life everlasting? Wonder rather that God for man would so come in the Passion unto death for man.' Adam of St. Victor, the prince and laureate of Latin hymnists, has also sung of the Resurrection : 'Vita mortem superat : Quod prius amiserat, Let us linger a little over the blessed words, which contain answer to all the voices of perplexed or sorrowful humanity. Our hands may touch each several word, and then unite and weave them together, as the musician presses the various keys to call forth the interwoven sounds and * Some Christian hand added here in ancient times a gloss, άπò Tov žúλov, from the wood-i.e., of the Cross, because Christ's royalty began with His Passion, and the Cross was His royal throne. And this gloss was supposed by some of the Fathers (as Justin, Tertullian, Augustine) to be a genuine portion of the sacred text here; but it is not found in any ancient version.'—Wordsworth, ' On Psalm xcvi. 10.' Cf. Justin Mart. c. Tryph., cap. 73. chords of sweetness. They will yield us most Divine echoes of the songs of Paradise and of the hidden life there in God. The actual conversion of this penitent thief is a glory so eminently supernatural, that it too often eclipses in our thoughts another beautiful light of grace, which shines more hiddenly behind the words of Christ. It was indeed a most Divine wonder that a blaspheming malefactor, dying with the red stain of murder on his soul and on his hands, should be called to such faith and repentance in his last moments as to own the Crucified Jesus in His disfigurement and deepest humiliation, that must have seemed so ungodlike, to be the very Son of God. Yes; it was a tremendous miracle of grace that such a desperate soul should be so blessed, and at so late an hour;* for the dial's shadow had nearly touched the figure of the moment of the sunset. But must not another wonder, equally supernatural, present itself, though more concealed and veiled in the mystery and act of death? Here is one with the red brand of Cain upon his conscience, a religious bandit† of the robber-band of Barabbas, * It has been well said in an ancient homily, 'Unless we can show the robber's faith we cannot promise ourselves his beatitude.' Very touching, too, is that old Latin hymn by an unknown author, the 'Ecquis Binas Columbinas': 'Pro latrone, Jesu bone, Tu in crucem tolleris ? Pro peccatis meis gratis, Vita mea, moreris?' 'Sacred Latin Poetry,' p. 151. † Archbishop Trench supposes this robber to have been one of the Zealots, in whom, therefore, 'so many elements of nobleness' might display themselves. 'His had been' (he says) 'no petty larcenies; as little, in all likelihood, had he meant at the beginning to have his living by violence and wrong. Those whom the Romans, with a certain amount of truth, called "robbers," were oftentimes wild and stormy zealots, maintaining in arms a last and hopeless protest against that |