--'neither
death nor life.' What more can be said? Surely, these two include
everything. From one point of view they do. But yet, as we shall see,
there is more to be said. And the special reason for beginning with
this pair of possible enemies is probably to be found by remembering
that they are a pair, that between them they do cover the whole
ground and represent the _extremes_ of change which can befall
us. The one stands at the one pole, the other at the other. If these
two stations, so far from each other, are equally near to God's love,
then no intermediate point can be far from it. If the most violent
change which we can experience does not in the least matter to the
grasp which the love of God has on us, or to the grasp which we may
have on it, then no less violent a change can be of any consequence.
It is the same thought in a somewhat modified form, as we find in
another word of Paul's, 'Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and
whether we die, we die unto the Lord.' Our subordination to Him is
the same, and our consecration should be the same, in all varieties
of condition, even in that greatest of all variations. His love to us
makes no account of that mightiest of changes. How should it be
affected by slighter ones?

The distance of a star is measured by the apparent change in its
position, as seen from different points of the earth's surface or
orbit. But this great Light stands steadfast in our heaven, nor moves
a hair's-breadth, nor pours a feebler ray on us, whether we look up
to it from the midsummer day of busy life, or from the midwinter of
death. These opposites are parted by a distance to which the millions
of miles of the world's path among the stars are but a point, and yet
the love of God streams down on them alike.

Of course, the confidence in immortality is implied in this thought.
Death does not, in the slightest degree, affect the essential
vitality of the soul; so it does not, in the slightest degree, affect
the outflow of God's love to that soul. It is a change of condition
and circumstance, and no more. He does not lose us in the dust of
death. The withered leaves on the pathway are trampled into mud, and
indistinguishable to human eyes; but He sees them even as when they
hung green and sunlit on the mystic tree of life.

How beautifully this thought contrasts with the saddest aspect of the
power of death in our human experience! He is Death the Separator,
who unclasps our hands f