dread of darkness and mystery, and such a way of viewing death has become obsolete through the scientific and philosophic developments of the later centuries.  Walt Whitman also tells us “that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,” and he has exprest the humanist view of mortality in a hymn which his admirers regard as the high-water mark of modern poetry.  But will this rhapsody bear thinking about?  Is death “delicate, lovely and soothing,” “delicious,” coming to us with “serenades”?  Does death “lave us in a flood of bliss”?  Does “the body gratefully nestle close to death”?  Do we go forth to meet death “with dances and chants of fullest welcome”?  It is vain to attempt to hide the direst fact of all under plausible metaphors and rhetorical artifice.  It is in defiance of all history that man so write.  It is in contradiction of the universal instinct.  It is mockery to the dying.  It is an outrage upon the mourners.  The Elizabethan masters were far truer to the fact; so is the modern skeptic who shrinks at “the black and horrible grave.”  Men never speak of delicious blindness, of delicious dumbness, of delicious deafness, of delicious paralysis; and death is all these disasters in one, all these disasters without hope.  No, no, the morgue is the last place that lends itself to decoration.  Death is the crowning evil, the absolute bankruptcy, the final defeat, the endless exile.  Let us not shut our eyes to this.  The skeptic often tells us that he will have no “make-believe.”  Let us have no “make-believe” about death.  Let us candidly apprehend death for all that it is of mystery and bitterness, and reconcile ourselves to it, if reconciliation be possible.  If we are foolish enough to shut the gate on the thought of death, by no stratagem can we shut the gate upon death itself.

Without evasion or euphony Christ recognizes the somber mystery.  The fact, the power, the terror of death are displayed by Him without reserve or softening.  And He goes to the root of the dire and dismal matter.  He shows us that death as we know it is an unnatural thing, that it is the fruit of disobedience, and by giving us purity and peace He gives us eternal life.  The words of Luther, so full of power, were called “half-battles”; but the words of Christ in their depth and majesty are complete battles, in which sin, suffering, and death are finally routed.  He attempts no logical proof of immortality; He supplies no chemical formula for the resurrection; He demonstrates immortality by raising us from the death of sin to the life of righteousness, by filling our soul with infinite aspirations and delights.  Here is the proof supreme of immortality.  “Verily, verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father.”  The moral works are the greater works.  Wonderful is the stilling of the sea, the healing of the blind, the raising of the dead, but the moral miracles of