I may seem to have taken a strange text on which to speak,—­a mournful, a seemingly hopeless text.  Why I have chosen it, I trust that you will see presently; certainly not that I may make you hopeless about death.  Meanwhile, let us consider it; for it is in the Bible, and, like all words in the Bible, was written for our instruction.

Now it is plain, I think, that the man who said these words—­good king Hezekiah—­knew nothing of what we call heaven; of a blessed life with God after death.  He looks on death as his end.  If he dies, he says, he will not see the Lord in the land of the living, any more than he will see man with the inhabitants of the world.  God’s mercies, he thinks, will end with his death.  God can only show His mercy and truth by saving him from death.  For the grave cannot praise God, death cannot celebrate Him; those who go down into the pit cannot hope for His truth.  The living, the living, shall praise God; as Hezekiah praises Him that day, because God has cured him of his sickness, and added fifteen years to his life.

No language can be plainer than this.  A man who had believed that he would go to heaven when he died could not have used it.

In many of the Psalms, likewise, you will find words of exactly the same kind, which show that the men who wrote them had no clear conception, if any conception at all, of a life after death.

Solomon’s words about death are utterly awful from their sadness.  With him, ’that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; as one dieth, so dieth the other.  Yea, they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence over a beast, and all is vanity.  All go to one place, all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.  Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?’

He knows nothing about it.  All he knows is, that the spirit shall return to God who gave it,—­and that a man will surely find, in this life, a recompence for all his deeds, whether good or evil.

’Remember therefore thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them.  Fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.  For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil.’

This is the doctrine of the Old Testament; that God judges and rewards and punishes men in this life:  but as for death, it is a great black cloud into which all men must enter, and see and be seen no more.  Only twice or thrice, perhaps, a gleam of light from beyond breaks through the dark.  David, the noblest and wisest of all the Jews, can say once that God will not leave his soul in hell, neither suffer His holy one to see corruption; Job says that, though after his skin worms destroy his body, yet in his flesh he