For what is this same eternal death?  The opposite surely to eternal life.  Eternal life is to know God, and therefore to obey Him.  Eternal life is to know God, whose name is love; and therefore, to rejoice to fulfil His law, of which it is written, ’Love is the fulfilling of the law;’ and therefore to be full of love ourselves, as it is written, ’We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren;’ and again, ’Every one that loveth, knoweth God, for God is love.’  And on the other hand, eternal death is not to know God, and therefore not to care for His law of love, and therefore to be without love; as it is written on the other hand, ‘He that loveth not his brother abideth in death.’  ’Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer;’ and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him; and again, ’He that loveth not, knoweth not God, for God is love.’  Eternal death, then, is to love no one; to be shut up in the dark prison-house of our own wilful and wayward thoughts and passions, full of spite, suspicion, envy, fear; in fact, in one word, to be a devil.  Oh, my friends, is not that damnation indeed, to be a devil here on earth, and for aught we know, for ever and ever?

Do you not know what frame of mind I mean?  Thank God, none of us, I suppose, is ever utterly without some grain of love left for some one; none of us, I suppose, is ever utterly shut up in himself; and as long as there is love there is life and as long as there is life there is hope:  but yet there have been moments when one has felt with horror how near, and how terrible, and how easy was this same eternal death which some fancy only possible after they die.

For, my friends, were you ever, any one of you, for one half hour, completely angry, completely sulky? displeased and disgusted with everybody and everything round you, and yet displeased and disgusted with yourself all the while; liking to think everyone wrong, liking to make out that they were unjust to you; feeling quite proud at the notion that you were an injured person:  and yet feeling in your heart the very opposite of all these fancies:  feeling that you were wrong, that you were unjust to them, and feeling utterly ashamed at the thought that they were the injured persons, and that you had injured them.  And perhaps, to make all worse, the person about whom all this storm had arisen in your heart, was some dear friend or relation whom you loved (strange contradiction, yet most true) at the very moment that you were trying to hate.  Oh, my friends, if one such dark hour has ever come home to you; if you have ever let the sun go down upon your wrath, and so given place to the devil, then you know something at least of what eternal death is.  You know how, in such moments, there is a worm in the heart, and a fire in the heart, compared with which all bodily torment would be light and bearable; a worm in the heart which does not die:  and a fire in the heart which you cannot quench: