Southern Christian Advocate

Life and Death.

Life is but death's vestibule, and our pilgrimage on earth but a journey to the grave. The pulse that preserves our being beats our dead march, and the blood which circulates our life is floating it outward to the depths of death. To-day we see our friends in health; to-morrow we hear of their decease. We clasped the hand of the strong man but yesterday, and to-day we closed his eyes. We rode in a chariot of comfort but an hour ago, and in a few hours the last black chariot must convey us to the home of all the living. O, how closely allied is death to life! The lamb that sported in the field must soon feel the knife. The ox in the pasture is fattening for the slaughter. Trees do but grow that they may be felled. Yes, and greater things than these feel death. Empires rise and flourish; they flourish but to decay; they rise but to fall.

How often do we take up a volume of history and read of the rise and fall of empires? We hear of the coronation and death of kings. Death is the black servant who rides behind the chariot of life. See life, and death is close behind it. Death reaches far throughout this world, and hath stamped terrestrial things with the broad arrow of the grave. Stars die, mayhap; it is said that conflagrations have been seen afar off in the ether, and astronomers have marked the funerals of other worlds—the decay of those mighty orbs that we have imagined set for ever in sockets of silver to glisten as the lamps of eternity. Blessed be God, there is one place where death is not life's brother—where life reigns alone; "to live is not the first syllable which is to be followed by the next, "to die." There is a land where the death knells are never tolled, where winding-sheets are never woven, where graves are never dug. Blest land beyond the skies! To reach it we must die.—Spurgeon.