and, I suppose, its strangeness is the
reason why our translators have softened it down to the more familiar
and obvious 'in Jesus.' We can understand living through Christ, on
being sacred through Christ, but what can _sleeping_ through Christ
mean? I shall hope to answer the question presently, but, in the
meantime, I only wish to point out what the Apostle does say, and to
plead for letting him say it, strange though it sounds. For the strange
and the difficult phrases of Scripture are like the hard quartz reefs in
which gold is, and if we slur them over we are likely to loose the
treasure. Let us try if we can find what the gold here may be.

Now, there are only two thoughts that I wish to dwell upon as suggested
by these words. One is the softened aspect of death, and of the state of
the Christian dead; and the other is the ground or cause of that
softened aspect.

I. First, then, the softened aspect of death, and of the state of the
Christian dead.

It is to Jesus primarily that the New Testament writers owe their use of
this gracious emblem of sleep. For, as you remember, the word was twice
upon our Lord's lips; once when, over the twelve-years-old maid from
whom life had barely ebbed away, He said, 'She is not dead, but
sleepeth'; and once when in regard of the man Lazarus, from whom life
had removed further, He said, 'Our friend sleepeth, but I go that I may
awake him out of sleep.' But Jesus was not the originator of the
expression. You find it in the Old Testament, where the prophet Daniel,
speaking of the end of the days and the bodily Resurrection, designates
those who share in it as 'them that sleep in the dust of the earth.' And
the Old Testament was not the sole origin of the phrase. For it is too
natural, too much in accordance with the visibilities of death, not to
have suggested itself to many hearts, and been shrined in many
languages. Many an inscription of Greek and Roman date speaks of death
under this figure; but almost always it is with the added, deepened note
of despair, that it is a sleep which knows no waking, but lasts through
eternal night.

Now, the Christian thought associated with this emblem is the precise
opposite of the pagan one. The pagan heart shrank from naming the ugly
thing because it was so ugly. So dark and deep a dread coiled round the
man, as he contemplated it, that he sought to drape the dreadfulness in
some kind of thin, transparent veil, and to put the buffer of a w