IV.

These, my brethren, are some of the greatnesses of death in itself and in its manifestation to us of God. If those things are true, I need not say more on that other point-that death has a marvellous gift of ennobling and elevating us. I speak now only of the thought of death, the familiar contemplation of this inevitable but most precious truth. Those who live with great men, or who take a part in great deeds, or who study great works and give themselves to great pursuits, these men gain accordingly some share of the greatness of their friends, or their teachers, or their studies, or their actions. The mere resolution not to fear the risk of death, nerves even the bad to deeds great in their badness, and the good to deeds of true heroism. My brethren, apart from goodness or badness, what is the characteristic of human life. and human society as we see them in all around us, nay, as we see them in ourselves? Is it not their pettiness, their triviality, their small aims, and ambitions? Yes, life is made up of a crowd of trivialities, a swarm of vanities—emptiness, childishness, frivolity, a waste of time and thought and energy upon nothings, which cannot satisfy the undying mind that must be fed. Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities! And yet this life of ours was not given us to be wasted in blowing bubbles or in playing with toys. It was not given us for elaborate fooling and newsmongering, for building castles on the sand. Human life in truth

is not trivial-its daily round of small duties and successive occupations is invented for us by God, that we may practise virtue, and serve Him, and conquer ourselves, and use grace, and fit ourselves for an immortal life. It is the want of this great truth that makes life so trivial and so miserable. "Oh," says the Prophet, "that they would be wise and would understand, and would provide for their last end! How should one pursue after a thousand, and two chase ten thousand!" Death is the first of the great truths, the truth from which the others follow. Death alone interprets life;-but it not only interprets life, it makes life great and it makes life noble. Yes, we can be great and noble now, live as men who are to die-as men who are to die, but to whom death is not to be only the end of all that is foolish, and transitory, and childish, and frivolous, but the opening of the gates of eternity, where all is grand, and noble, and peaceful, and enduring, where the minds and hearts of the children of God, so feeble in themselves, are strengthened to the contemplation of the most clear Truth, and to the enjoyment of the most pure Love.

1 Deut. xxxii. 29, 30.

if we

SERMON XIX.

THE SACREDNESS OF DEATH.

Et pro eis ego sanctifico me ipsum, ut sint et ipsi sanctificati in veritate. And for them do I sanctify Myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

(Words taken from the 17th verse of the 19th chapter of St. John's Gospel.)

I.

WHAT does our Lord mean, when He speaks of sanctifying Himself, that those whom He loves so much may be sanctified in truth? We can understand easily enough how His followers and children. can be sanctified through Him in truth, because it is through Him and from Him that all grace proceeds: "He was full of grace and truth, and of His fulness we have all received," and He it is Who sends us the Holy Ghost Himself, the Sanctifier, to dwell in our hearts. That is easy enough-but how does our Lord sanctify Himself? He uses the word sanctify, as we are told by the holy writers of the Church, in the sense in which it occurs elsewhere in Sacred Scripture, of the sacrifice of Himself in death. More than once in Sacred Scripture does it bear this meaning, signifying that death consecrates, as it were, what it touches, and consecrates it to

God, the Author and Master of human life.

Thus

in the Old Testament all the first-born of Israel are said to be sanctified to the Lord, by which is meant that they belong in a special manner to God, Who had taken them as His own portion when He slew all the first-born in the land of Egypt, and it was in consequence and in acknowledgment of this sanctification that all the first-born of the chosen people, our Lord among them, as the First-born of His Mother, were to be presented in the Temple, and a ransom paid for them by sacrifice, in order, as it were, to buy their lives back from God.1 Our Lord, then, speaks of His Death as a kind of sanctification or consecration, not that anything in life or death could make Him holier, Who was the Source of all holiness, the ineffably Holy One with all the Holiness of the Divine Nature, but that it was a sacrifice of His life to the Father, and as such a consecration. Now this, dear brethren, is not confined to our Lord. What He has done in particular to hallow and consecrate all Christian deaths, is a part of this great subject which I reserve now for a future discourse. But setting that aside for the moment, I say that death in itself, that all deaths, have by the decree of God this sacred and consecrating character, and it is of this that I shall speak to-day. I find this set forth by the Church in one of the hymns which she puts into the mouths of her ministers in the daily Office, when, at the ninth hour, when the day has turned to its decline and the shades of evening draw on, she bids them say,

1 Exodus xiii. 2, 14, 15.

Y

Largire lumen vespere,

Quo vita nunquam decidat,
Sed præmium mortis sacræ
Perennis instet gloria.

Grant us light at eventide,
That our life may still abide,
And, a sacred dying's meed,

Endless glory may succeed.

A sacred death! This may have, as the Church tells us, so great a value in the sight of God that it may purchase, as it meeds, an eternal glory! Death, then, is not only a great thing, but it is a religious act, a sacred thing, it is something which is consecrated, something which belongs to God.

You will say to me perhaps, my brethren, that life is a sacred thing as well as death-that "whether we live, we live to the Lord; or whether we die, we die to the Lord,"1 that "whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, we are to do all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ."2 Certainly-and I say that good Christians who live in this way, who look to God and behold Him Who is invisible, as St. Paul says, in all the actions of their daily life, they are preparing themselves by a sacred life for a sacred death. They will be the first to understand how great is the truth of the sacredness of death. And I say further, that this truth is so deeply imprinted on the natural religiousness and conscience and instinct of man, that even those who live in such a way that they cannot be said to recognize the sacred character of life, even those do acknowledge that death is solemn and sacred. The 21 Cor. x. 31.

1 Romans xiv. 8.