For such reasons the transitory passage becomes less painful and unwelcome.  Who is there that would hesitate to dip his foot into the ice-cold brook if he knew that it would not reach above his ankles, and that a step would land him in blessedness unimagined till experienced?

Therefore the Christian temper is that of quiet willingness and constant courage.  There is nothing hysterical here, nothing morbid, nothing overstrained, nothing artificial.  The Apostle says:  ’I would rather not.  I should like if I could escape it.  It is an unwelcome necessity; but when I see what I do see beyond,’ I am ready.  Since so it must be, I will go, not reluctantly, nor dragged away from life, nor clinging desperately to it as it slips from my hands, nor dreading anything that may happen beyond; but always courageous, and prepared to go whithersoever the path may take me, since I am sure that it ends in His bosom.  He is willing to go from the home of the body, because to do that is to go home to Christ.

There are other references of our Apostle’s, substantially of the same tone as that of my text, but with very beautiful and encouraging differences.  When he was nearer his end, when it seemed to him as if the headsman’s block was not very far off, his willingness had intensified into ’having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better.’  And when the end was all but reached, and he knew that death was waiting just round the next turn in the road, he said, with the confidence that in the midst of the struggle would have been vainglory, but at the end of it was a foretaste of the calm of Heaven, ’I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness.’  That is our model, dear brethren,—­’always courageous,’ afraid of nothing in life, in death, or beyond, and therefore willing to go from home from the body and to go home to the Lord.

Think of this man thus fronting the inevitable, with no excitement and with no delusions.  Remember what Paul believed about death, about sin, about his own sin, about judgment, about hell.  And then think of how to him death had made its darkness beautiful with the light of Christ’s face, and all the terror was gone out of it.  Do you think so about death?  Do you shrink from it?  Why?  Why do you not take Paul’s cure for the shrinking?  If you can say, ‘To me to live is Christ,’ you will have no difficulty in saying, ‘and to die is gain.’  That is the only way by which you can come to such a temper, and then you will be willing to move from the cottage to the palace, and to wait in peace till you are shifted again into ’the building of God, the house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’

PLEASING CHRIST

   ’We labour that whether present or absent we may be
   accepted of Him.’—­2 COR. v. 2.