violent a change can be of any consequence.  It is the same thought in a somewhat modified form, as we find in another word of Paul’s, ’Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord.’  Our subordination to Him is the same, and our consecration should be the same, in all varieties of condition, even in that greatest of all variations.  His love to us makes no account of that mightiest of changes.  How should it be affected by slighter ones?

The distance of a star is measured by the apparent change in its position, as seen from different points of the earth’s surface or orbit.  But this great Light stands steadfast in our heaven, nor moves a hair’s-breadth, nor pours a feebler ray on us, whether we look up to it from the midsummer day of busy life, or from the midwinter of death.  These opposites are parted by a distance to which the millions of miles of the world’s path among the stars are but a point, and yet the love of God streams down on them alike.

Of course, the confidence in immortality is implied in this thought.  Death does not, in the slightest degree, affect the essential vitality of the soul; so it does not, in the slightest degree, affect the outflow of God’s love to that soul.  It is a change of condition and circumstance, and no more.  He does not lose us in the dust of death.  The withered leaves on the pathway are trampled into mud, and indistinguishable to human eyes; but He sees them even as when they hung green and sunlit on the mystic tree of life.

How beautifully this thought contrasts with the saddest aspect of the power of death in our human experience!  He is Death the Separator, who unclasps our hands from the closest, dearest grasp, and divides asunder joints and marrow, and parts soul and body, and withdraws us from all our habitude and associations and occupations, and loosens every bond of society and concord, and hales us away into a lonely land.  But there is one bond which his ‘abhorred shears’ cannot cut.  Their edge is turned on it.  One Hand holds us in a grasp which the fleshless fingers of Death in vain strive to loosen.  The separator becomes the uniter; he rends us apart from the world that He may ‘bring us to God.’  The love filtered by drops on us in life is poured upon us in a flood in death; ’for I am persuaded, that neither death nor life shall be able to separate us from the love of God.’

II.  The love of God is undiverted from us by any other order of beings.

‘Nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers,’ says Paul.  Here we pass from conditions affecting ourselves to living beings beyond ourselves.  Now, it is important for understanding the precise thought of the Apostle to observe that this expression, when used without any qualifying adjective, seems uniformly to mean good angels, the hierarchy of blessed spirits before the throne.  So that there is no reference to ‘spiritual wickedness in high places’