thing which advancing knowledge makes clearer than another, it is
that death is swallowed up in life, and life in death; so that if
the last enemy that shall be subdued is death, then indeed is our
salvation nearer than what we thought, for in strictness there is
neither life nor death, nor thought nor thing, except as figures of
speech, and as the approximations which strike us for the time as
most convenient. There is neither perfect life nor perfect death,
but a being ever with the Lord only, in the eternal f??a, or going
to and fro and heat and fray of the universe. When we were young we
thought the one certain thing was that we should one day come to
die; now we know the one certain thing to be that we shall never
wholly do so. Non omnis moriar, says Horace, and "I die daily,"
says St. Paul, as though a life beyond the grave, and a death on
this side of it, were each some strange thing which happened to them
alone of all men; but who dies absolutely once for all, and for ever
at the hour that is commonly called that of death, and who does not
die daily and hourly? Does any man in continuing to live from day
to day or moment to moment, do more than continue in a changed body,
with changed feelings, ideas, and aims, so that he lives from moment
to moment only in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment to
moment also? Does any man in dying do more than, on a larger and
more complete scale, what he has been doing on a small one, as the
most essential factor of his life, from the day that he became "he"
at all? When the note of life is struck the harmonics of death are
sounded, and so, again, to strike death is to arouse the infinite
harmonics of life that rise forthwith as incense curling upwards
from a censer. If in the midst of life we are in death, so also in
the midst of death we are in life, and whether we live or whether we
die, whether we like it and know anything about it or no, still we
do it to the Lord--living always, dying always, and in the Lord