in, it is pointed out that death has another and a totally different
character. Death in any given case may be so far from coming as a
judgment of God, that it actually comes as a gracious gift from Him; it
may even be an answer to prayer, a merciful deliverance from pain, an
event welcomed by suffering human nature, and by all who sympathise with
it. This is quite true, but again, one must point out, rests on the
false abstraction so often referred to. Man is regarded in all this
simply in the character of a sufferer, and death as that which brings
suffering to an end; but that is not all the truth about man, nor all the
truth about death. Physical pain may be so terrible that consciousness
is absorbed and exhausted in it, sometimes even extinguished, but it is
not to such abnormal conditions we should appeal to discover the deepest
truths in the moral consciousness of man. If the waves of pain subsided,
and the whole nature collected its forces again, and conscience was once
more audible, death too would be seen in a different light. It might not
indeed be apprehended at once, as Scripture apprehends it, but it would
not be regarded simply as a welcome relief from pain. It would become
possible to see in it something through which God spoke to the
conscience, and eventually to realise its intimate relation to sin.

The objections we have just considered are not very serious, because they
practically mean that death has no moral character at all; they reduce it
to a natural phenomenon, and do not bring it into any relation to the
conscience. It is a more respectable, and perhaps a more formidable
objection, when death is brought into the moral world, and when the plea
is put forward that so far from being God's judgment upon sin, it may be
itself a high moral achievement. A man may die greatly; his death may be
a triumph; nothing in his life may become him like the leaving it. Is
not this inconsistent with the idea that there is any peculiar connection
between death and sin? From the Biblical point of view the answer must
again be in the negative. There is no such triumph over death as makes
death itself a noble ethical achievement, which is not at the same time a
triumph over sin. Man vanquishes the one only as in the grace of God he
is able to vanquish the other. The doom that is in death passes away
only as the sin to which it is related is transcended. But there is more
than this to be said. Death can