whatever to
do with him, feel the virtue of his gracious presence penetrating
their whole nature; because he lives, they must live also.

Behold, then, life and death set before us; not remote (if a few
years be, indeed, to be called remote), but even now present before
us; even now suffered or enjoyed. Even now we are alive unto God or
dead unto God; and, as we are either the one or the other, so we
are, in the highest possible sense of the terms, alive or dead. In
the highest possible sense of the terms; but who can tell what that
highest possible sense of the terms is? So much has, indeed, been
revealed to us, that we know now that death means a conscious and
perpetual death, as life means a conscious and perpetual life. But
greatly, indeed, do we deceive ourselves, if we fancy that, by
having thus much told us, we have also risen to the infinite
heights, or descended to the infinite depths, contained in those
little words, life and death. They are far higher, and far deeper,
than ever thought or fancy of man has reached to. But, even on the
first edge of either, at the visible beginnings of that infinite
ascent or descent, there is surely something which may give us a
foretaste of what is beyond. Even to us in this mortal state, even
to you advanced but so short a way on your very earthly journey,
life and death have a meaning: to be dead unto God or to be alive to
him, are things perceptibly different.

For, let me ask of those who think least of God, who are most
separate from him, and most without him, whether there is not now
actually, perceptibly, in their state, something of the coldness,
the loneliness, the fearfulness of death? I do not ask them whether
they are made unhappy by the fear of God's anger; of course they are
not: for they who fear God are not dead to him, nor he to them. The
thought of him gives them no disquiet at all; this is the very point
we start from. But I would ask them whether they know what it is to
feel God's blessing, For instance: we all of us have our troubles of
some sort or other, our disappointments, if not our sorrows. In
these troubles, in these disappointments,--I care not how small they
may be,--have they known what it is to feel that God's hand is over
them; that these little annoyances are but his fatherly correction;
that he is all the time loving us, and supporting us? In seasons of
joy, such as they taste very often, have they known what it is to
feel tha