rom the closest, dearest grasp, and divides
asunder joints and marrow, and parts soul and body, and withdraws us
from all our habitude and associations and occupations, and loosens
every bond of society and concord, and hales us away into a lonely
land. But there is one bond which his 'abhorred shears' cannot cut.
Their edge is turned on _it_. One Hand holds us in a grasp which
the fleshless fingers of Death in vain strive to loosen. The
separator becomes the uniter; he rends us apart from the world that
He may 'bring us to God.' The love filtered by drops on us in life is
poured upon us in a flood in death; 'for I am persuaded, that neither
death nor life shall be able to separate us from the love of God.'

II. The love of God is undiverted from us by any other order of
beings.

'Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,' says Paul. Here we pass
from conditions affecting ourselves to living beings beyond
ourselves. Now, it is important for understanding the precise thought
of the Apostle to observe that this expression, when used without any
qualifying adjective, seems uniformly to mean good angels, the
hierarchy of blessed spirits before the throne. So that there is no
reference to 'spiritual wickedness in high places' striving to draw
men away from God. The supposition which the Apostle makes is,
indeed, an impossible one, that these ministering spirits, who are
sent forth to minister to them who shall be heirs of salvation,
should so forget their mission and contradict their nature as to seek
to bar us out from the love which it is their chiefest joy to bring
to us. He knows it to be an impossible supposition, and its very
impossibility gives energy to his conclusion, just as when in the
same fashion he makes the other equally impossible supposition about
an angel from heaven preaching another gospel than that which he had
preached to them.

So we may turn the general thought of this second category of
impotent efforts in two different ways, and suggest, first, that it
implies the utter powerlessness of any third party in regard to the
relations between our souls and God.

We alone have to do with Him alone. The awful fact of individuality,
that solemn mystery of our personal being, has its most blessed or
its most dread manifestation in our relation to God. There no other
Being has any power. Counsel and stimulus, suggestion or temptation,
instruction or lies, which may tend to lead us nearer to Him or away