with God should only have a poor earthly life to do it in, and that
all these aspirations, these emotions, should be bounded and ended
by a trivial thing, that touches only the physical frame. Surely,
surely, there is nothing so absurd as to believe that he who can say
'Thou art my God,' and who has said it, should ever by anything be
brought to cease to say it. Death cannot kill love to God; and the
only end of the religious life of earth is its perfecting in heaven.
The experiences that we have here, in their loftiness and in their
incompleteness, equally witness for us, of the rest and the
perfectness that remain for the children of God.

Then, again, this man in his unique experience was, and is, a
witness of the fact that death is an excrescence, and results from
sin. I suppose that he trod the road which the divine intention had
destined to be trodden by all the children of men, if they had not
sinned; and that his experience, unique as it is, is a survival, so
to speak, of what was meant to be the law for humanity, unless there
had intervened the terrible fact of sin and its wages, death. The
road had been made, and this one man was allowed to travel along it
that we might all learn, by the example of the exception, that the
rule under which we live was not the rule that God originally meant
for us, and that death has resulted from the fact of transgression.
No doubt Enoch had in him the seeds of it, no doubt there were the
possibilities of disease and the necessity of death in his physical
frame, but God has shown us in that one instance, and in the other
of the great prophet's, how _He_ is not subject to the law that
men shall die, although men are subject to it, and that if He will,
He can take them all to Himself, as He did take these two, and will
take them who, at last, shall not die but be changed.