nced system of thought. Nor is surcease of sorrow thus
brought to the man to whom has come a bereavement, or a succession of
bereavements, which makes him feel that all the glory and joy of life,
its friendship and love and hope, have gone down into the grave, so
that he can say,

Three dead men have I loved,
And thou wert last of the three.

At the same time, if it be true that there is a meaning in friendship,
a spiritual discipline to educate the heart and train the life, it must
also be true that there is equally a meaning in the eclipse of
friendship. If we have enough faith to see death to be good, we will
find out for ourselves why it is good. It may teach us just what we
were in danger of forgetting, some omission in our lives, which was
making them shallow and poor. It may be to one a sight into the
mystery of sin; to another a sight into the mystery of love. To one it
comes with the lesson of patience, which is only a side of the lesson
of faith; to another it brings the message of sympathy. As we turn the
subject toward the light, there come gleams of color from different
facets of it.

All life is an argument for death. We cannot persist long in the
effort to live the Christian life, without feeling the need for death.
The higher the aims, and the truer the aspirations, the greater is the
burden of living, until it would become intolerable. Sooner or later
we are forced to make the confession of Job, "I would not live alway."
To live forever in this sordidness, to have no reprieve from the doom
of sin, no truce from the struggle of sin, would be a fearful fate.

To the Christian, therefore, death cannot be looked on as evil; first,
because it is universal, and it is universal because it is
God-ordained. In St. Peter's, at Rome, there are many tombs, in which
death is symbolized in its traditional form as a skeleton, with the
fateful hourglass and the fearful scythe. Death is the rude reaper,
who cruelly cuts off life and all the joy of life. But there is one in
which death is sculptured as a sweet gentle motherly woman, who takes
her wearied child home to safer and surer keeping. It is a truer
thought than the other. Death is a minister of God, doing His
pleasure, and doing us good.

Again, it cannot be evil because it means a fuller life, and therefore
an opportunity for fuller and further service. Faith will not let a
man hasten the climax; for it is in the hands of love, as he hi