with blazing glories. 'If light so much conceals, wherefore not life?'
Let us hold fast by a deeper wisdom than is born of sense; and though
men, nowadays, seem to be willing to go back to the 'eternal sleep' of
the most unspiritual heathenism, and to cast away all that Christ has
brought us concerning that world where He has been and whence He has
returned, because positive science and the anatomist's scalpel preach no
gospel of a future, let us try to feel as well as to believe that it is
life, with all its stunted capacities and idle occupation with baseless
fabrics, which is the sleep, and that for us all the end of it is--to
awake.

II. The second principle contained in our text is that death is to some
men the awaking of God.

'When Thou awakest, Thou shalt despise their image.' Closely rendered,
the former clause would read simply 'in awaking,' without any specifying
of the person, which is left to be gathered from the succeeding words.
But there is no doubt that the English version fills the blank correctly
by referring the awaking to God.

The metaphor is not infrequent in the Old Testament, and, like many
others applying to the divine nature, is saved from any possibility of
misapprehension by the very boldness of its materialism. It has a
well-marked and uniform meaning. God 'awakes' when He ends an epoch of
probation and long-suffering mercy by an act or period of judgment. So
far, then, as the mere expression is concerned, there may be nothing
more meant here than the termination by a judicial act in this life, of
the transient 'prosperity of the wicked.' Any divinely-sent catastrophe
which casts the worldly rich man down from his slippery eminence would
satisfy the words. But the emphatic context seems, as already pointed