The Christian View of Death

"All around, man's acres lie,
Under this same brooding sky.
There, the plowman blithely sings;
Broadcast, there the sower flings
Golden grain, to die in gloom,
Making every clod its tomb.
Lo! a miracle is seen-
Acres clothed in living green.

"In their midst, God's acre lies,
Under these same yearning skies.
Here, men move with dirges slow;
Here, their tears unbidden flow;
Loved forms, here, in earth they lay;
Leave to darkness and decay.

Autumns wane, and springs return;
Still they sleep 'neath shaft and urn.

"Side by side, those acres lie,

Under this expectant sky.

What? On God's lies death's dark spell,

While in man's comes miracle?

No! for love's eyes pierce the gloom!

No! for Christ hath burst the tomb!
God will give, by power unknown,
Each a body of its own!"

CHAPTER XXVII

The Christian View of Death

OMEHOW most people never get

beyond the heathen idea of death. They think of it as darkness and

terror. They talk of it as floods of waters through which they must pass. The fear of death is almost universal. Dying is surrounded in the minds of the great majority of men and women with all that is gloomy and dreadful. We shudder to think of our loved ones passing out of our homes of comfort, out of the gentle care of our love, into the strange mystery of dying. We tremble to think of ourselves sinking away into the shadow of death. There are many Christian people who do not have in their conception of the final departure a single gleam of the beauty and the blessedness with which the New Testament invests the death of the believer. If we could bring the Christian conception of dying into our every-day thought

of it, it would change all the terror and darkness which we are accustomed to associate with the great event into brightness and glory.

The New Testament does not employ a single alarming word in all its allusions to the subject. In the ruler's house when they said, "Thy daughter is dead," Jesus said, "Weep not; for she is not dead, but sleepeth." It was a priceless blessing that Jesus gave to the world when he gave the name sleep to what men had always called death.

It is interesting to notice how Jesus himself spoke of dying as he came toward it. We must not think of the darkness and mystery which were so terrible to Jesus before he came to the end as part of his experience of dying. The anguish of the Garden was most bitter. "He began to be sorrowful and sore troubled." Then on the cross when the darkness spread over all the land, there was heard from the holy Sufferer a cry, the saddest cry earth ever heard, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" But this was not