ning into them. Isaiah
had sung of a time when the veil over all nations should be destroyed
'in this mountain,' and when death should be swallowed up for ever;
and Paul grasps the words and says that the prophet's loftiest
anticipations will be fulfilled when that monster, whose insatiable
maw swallows down youth, beauty, strength, wisdom, will himself be
swallowed up. Hosea had prophesied of Israel's restoration under
figure of a resurrection, and Paul grasps _his_ words and fills them
with a larger meaning. He modifies them, in a manner on which we need
not enlarge, to express the great Christian thought that death has
conquered man but that man in Christ will conquer the conqueror. With
swift change of metaphor he represents death as a serpent, armed with
a poisoned sting, and that suggests to him the thought, never far
away in his view of man, that death's power to slay is derived
from--or, so to say, concentrated in--sin; and that at once raises
the other equally characteristic and familiar thought that law
stimulates sin, since to know a thing to be forbidden creates in
perverse humanity an itching to do it, and law reveals sin by setting
up the ideal from which sin is the departure. But just as the tracks
in Paul's mind were well worn, by which the thought of death brought
in that of sin, and that of sin drew after it that of law, so with
equal closeness of established association, that of law condemnatory
and slaying, brought up that of Christ the all-sufficient refuge from
that gloomy triad--Death Sin, Law. Through union with Him each of us
may possess His immortal risen life, in which Death, the engulfer, is
himself engulfed; Death, the conqueror, is conquered utterly and for
ever; Death, the serpent, has his sting drawn, and is harmless. That
participation in Christ's life is begun even here, and God 'giveth us
the victory' now, even while we live outward lives that must end in
death, and will give it perfectly in the resurrection, when 'they
cannot die any more,' and death itself is dead.

The loftiest Christian hopes have close relation to the lowliest
Christian duties, and Paul's triumphant song ends with plain,
practical, prose exhortations to steadfastness, unmovable tenacity,
and abundant fruitfulness, the motive and power of which will be
found in the assurance that, since there is a life beyond, all labour
here, however it may fail in the eyes of men, will not be in vain,
but will tell on character