I. Many have sought to realise the moment after death, and have strained imagination and faith to their utmost in the effort to pierce the veil beyond, and understand how we shall feel. The effort is not altogether in vain; for the attention of the mind will, at all events, give increased reality to the fact of the great change, and of the transit from one world into another, if it do no more. Before the intensity of that gaze one earthly thing after another will disappear, till the fact of the change stands out in all its single solemnity, and we look at it face to face, without a lingering earthly disturbance to cloud its distinctness as earthborn mists cloud the sun, and to clothe the fact with terrors not its own.
II. Why should we shrink from the thought of death, or why should it be painful to us? If there be pain, it is simply and solely because the thought is not habitual. The terror is in us, not in death. Let the thoughts habitually extend over both states, and it will be gone; the strangeness will all disappear. The mind will be in harmony with the facts; and if in some small degree the brightness of life be subdued, it will be only as the slanting shades of summer evening soften the glare, and make the landscape more beautiful than before.
E. Garbett, Experiences of the Inner Life,p. 267.
Perhaps the most awful moment of our lives is when we first feel in danger of death. All our past life then seems to be a cloud of words and shadows; one less real than another, moving and floating round about us, altogether external to the realities of the soul. Not only childhood and youth, happiness and sorrow, eager hopes and disturbing fears, but even our communion with God, our faith in things unseen, our self-knowledge, and our repentance, seem alike to be but visions of the memory. All has become stern, hard, and appalling. It is as if it were the beginning of a new existence; as if we had passed under a colder sky, and into a world where every object has a sharpness of outline almost too severe for sight to bear. Let us see what we ought to do when God warns us.
I. First, we must ask ourselves this question, Is there any one sin, great or small, of the flesh or of the spirit, that we willingly and knowingly commit? This is, in fact, the crisis of our whole spiritual life. By consent in one sin, a man is guilty of the whole principle of rebellion, of the whole idea of anarchy in God's kingdom and in His own soul. A holy man is not a man who never sins, but who never sins willingly. A sinner is not a man who never does anything good, but who willingly does what he knows to be evil. The whole difference lies within the sphere and compass of the will.
II. We must next search and see whether there is anything in which our heart in its secret affections is at variance with the mind of God; for if so, then so far our whole being is at variance with His. We may love what God hates, as the pride of life; or hate what God loves, as crosses and humiliations.
Surely we ought to fear so long as we are conscious that our will is surrounded by a circle of desires, over which self and the world so cast their shadows as to darken the tracings of God's image upon them.
III. A third test by which to test ourselves is the positive capacity of our spiritual being for the bliss of heaven. When St. Paul bids us to follow after "holiness, without which no man shall sec the Lord," he surely meant something more than a negative quality. Doubtless he meant by "holiness" to express the active aspirations of a spiritual nature, thirsting for the presence of God, desiring "to depart and to be with Christ." We must learn to live here on earth by the measures and qualities of heaven, in fellowship with saints and angels, and with the ever-blessed Trinity, before we can think to find our bliss in the kingdom of God.
IV. There are two short counsels which it may be well to add. (1) The first is, that we strive always to live so as to be akin to the state of just men made perfect. (2) The other is, that we often rehearse in life the last preparation we should make in death. Joseph made his sepulchre in his garden, in the midst of his most familiar scenes. And he had his reward, for that tomb became a pledge of his election.
H. E. Manning, Sermons,vol. iii., p. 311.
References: Isaiah 38:1. Preacher's Monthly,vol. iv., p. 363.Isaiah 38:1-5. E. M. Goulburn, Occasional Sermons,p. 403.Isaiah 38:9-20. S. Cox, Expositions,2nd series, p. 59. Isaiah 38:12. R. W. Evans, Parochial Sermons,vol. iii., p. 95; W. V. Robinson, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxx., p. 29.