My friends, if such a question rises in your mind, be sure that it, too, is a hint that you think yourself a debtor to the flesh—­to live according to the flesh.  For tell me, tell yourselves fairly, is your flesh, your body, the part of yourself which you can see and handle, You?—­You know that it is not.  When a neighbour’s body dies, you say, perhaps, ‘He is dead,’ but you say it carelessly; and when one whom you know well, and love, dies,—­when a parent, a wife, a child, dies, you feel very differently about them, even if you do not speak differently.  You feel and know that he, the person whom you loved and understood, and felt with, and felt for, here on earth, is not dead at all; you feel (and in proportion as the friend you have lost was loving, and good, and full of feeling for you, you feel it all the more strongly) that your friend, or your child, or the wife of your bosom, is alive still—­where you know not, but you feel they are alive; that they are very near you;—­that they are thinking of you, watching you, caring for you,—­perhaps grieving over you when you go wrong—­perhaps rejoicing over you when you go right,—­perhaps helping you, though you cannot see them, in some wonderful way.  You know that only their mortal flesh is dead.  That their mortal flesh was all you put into the grave; but that they themselves, their souls and spirits, which were their very and real selves, are alive for evermore; and you trust and hope to meet them when you die;—­ay, to meet them body and soul too, at the last day, the very same persons whom you knew here on earth, though the flesh which they wore here in this life has crumbled into dust years and ages before.

Is not this true?  Is not this a blessed life-giving thought—­I had almost said the most blessed and life-giving thought man can have—­ that those whom we have loved and lost are not dead, but only gone before; that they live still to God and with God; that only their flesh has perished, and they themselves are alive for evermore?

Now believe me, my friends, as surely as a man’s flesh can die and be buried, while he himself, his soul, lives for ever, just so a man’s self, his soul, can die, while his flesh lives on upon earth.  You do not think so, but the Bible thinks so.  The Bible talks of men being dead in trespasses and sins, while their flesh and body is alive and walking this earth.  It talks, too, of a worse state, of men twice dead; of men, who, after God has brought their souls to life, let those souls of theirs die down again within them, and rot away, as far as we can see, hopelessly and for ever.  And what is it which kills a man’s soul within him on this side the grave, and makes him dead while he has a name to live? Sin, evil-doing, the disease of the soul, the death of the soul, yea, the death of the man himself.  And what is sin but living according to the flesh, and not according to the spirit?  What is sin but living as the dumb animals do, as