ith curiosity that will find no answer, about the unrevealed
wonders and staggering mysteries of that transcendent thought, life
everlasting. Let us not acquire the habit of thinking of the future as
the perfecting of our humanity, without connecting all our speculations
with Him, whose presence will be all of heaven to us all. But let us
keep His serene figure ever clear before our imaginations in all the
blaze of the light, and try to feed our hopes and stay our hearts on
this aspect of heavenly blessedness as the all-embracing one, that all,
each for himself, shall be for ever conscious of Christ's loving
presence, and of the closest union with Him, a union in comparison with
which the dearest and sacredest blendings of heart with heart and life
with life are cold and distant. For the clearness of our hope the fewer
the details the better: for the willingness with which we turn from life
and face the inevitable end, it is very important that we should have
that one thought disengaged from all others. The one full moon, which
dims all the stars, draws the tides after it. These lesser lights may
gem the darkness, and dart down white shafts of brilliance in quivering
reflections on the waves, but they have no power to move their mass. It
is Christ and Christ only who draws us across the gulf to be with Him,
and reduces death to a mere shifting of our encampment.

This is a noble and worthy reason for wishing to die; not because Paul
is disappointed and sick of life, not because he is weighed down with
sorrow, or pain, or loss, or toil, but because he would like to be with
his Master. He is no morbid sentimentalist, he is cherishing no
unwholesome longing, he is not weary of work, he indulges in no
hysterical raptures of desire. What an eloquent simplicity is in that
quiet 'very far better!' It goes straight to one's heart, and says more
than paragraphs of falsetto yearnings. There is nothing in such a wish
to die, based on such a reason, that the most manly and wholesome piety
need be ashamed of. It is a pattern for us all.

The attraction of life contends with the attraction of heaven in these
verses. That is a conflict which many good men know something of, but
which does not take the shape with many of us which it assumed with
Paul. Drawn, as he is, by the supreme desire of close union with his
Master, for the sake of which he is ready to depart, he is tugged back
even more strongly by the thought that, if he stays h