Then this transition is regarded in my text as being the work of a moment.  It is not a long journey of which the beginning is ’to go from home, from the body,’ and the end is ’to go home, to the Lord.’  But it is one and the same motion which, looked at from the one side, is departure, and looked at from the other is arrival.  The old saying has it, ‘there is but a step between me and death.’  The truth is, there is but a step between me and life.  The mighty angel in the Apocalypse, that stood with one foot on the firm land and the other on the boundless ocean, is but the type of the spirit in the brief moment of transition, when the consciousness of two worlds blends, and it is clothed upon with the house which is from heaven, in the very act of stripping off the earthly house of this tabernacle.

Nor need I remind you, I suppose, in more than a sentence, that this transition obviously leads into a state of conscious communion with Jesus Christ.  The dreary figment of an unconscious interval for the disembodied spirit has no foundation, either in what we know of spirit, or in what is revealed to us in Scripture.  For the one thing that seems to make it probable—­the use of that metaphor of ’sleeping in Jesus’—­is quite sufficiently accounted for by the notions of repose, and cessation of outward activity, and withdrawal of capacity of being influenced by the so-called realities of this lower world, without dragging in the unfounded notion of unconsciousness.  My text is incompatible with it, for it is absurd to say of an unconscious spirit, clear of a bodily environment, that it is anywhere; and there is no intelligible sense in which the condition of such a spirit can be called being ‘with the Lord.’

So, then, I think a momentary transition, with uninterrupted consciousness, which leads to a far deeper and more wonderful and blessed sense of unity with Jesus Christ than is possible here on earth, is the true shape in which the act of death presents itself to the Christian thinker.

And remember, dear brethren, that is all we know.  Nothing else is certain—­nothing but this, ‘with the Lord,’ and the resulting certainty that therefore it is well with them.  It is enough for our faith, for our comfort, for our patient waiting.  They live in Christ, ‘and there we find them worthier to be loved,’ and certainly lapped in a deeper rest.  ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.’

II.  In the next place, note the Christian temper in which to anticipate the transition.

’We are always courageous, and willing rather to leave our home in the body, and to go home to the Lord.’  Now I must briefly remind you of how the Apostle comes to this state of feeling.  He has been speaking about the natural shrinking, which belongs to all humanity, from the act of dissolution, considered as being the stripping off of the garment of the flesh.  And he has declared, on behalf of himself and the early Christian Church, his own and