Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/127

 not arrived at that inward conviction from which it may be seen that death, in reality, is the prelude to a transference of life from the natural to the spiritual world.

The fear of death is man's common inheritance; it has grown up in him with the increase of his darkness concerning Divine things, and it has fixed itself upon him as a terror, in proportion to his evils and unbelief. The mere animals know nothing of this fear: they do not dread the cessation of their life: they gambol in the very place of slaughter, and never have a thought of death or a hereafter: thus the animals, which death really kills, do not fear it; whereas man, whom it cannot kill, lives in dread of its approach. Death, which is a reality to animals, occasions no alarm to them; but by men, who are immortal, and to whom therefore death is an impossibility, it is looked upon as "the cup of trembling."

Now this fear of death is a painful experience, which never could have been originally intended by the Divine providence. God is too good and merciful to have designed that man should live in the perpetual dread of an event which is one of the natural consequences of his existence in the world. "It is appointed unto all men once to die, and after that the judgment." We cannot doubt that it has always been the Lord's aim and endeavour to buoy us up with the hope of happiness and light; to give us joy with the sunshine of His teachings; to bless us with a true conception of our never-dying nature; to assure us that this world is the scene in which He has been pleased to place us, to give us the opportunity of preparing for a better: that this world is a school, in which He would be our schoolmaster, and in which we are to learn to love and to know the realities of His kingdom, and so to be educated for entering into its uses and enjoyments. No other