moment for us all. However closely we have been twined with others,
each of us has to unclasp dear hands, and make that journey through the
narrow, dark tunnel by himself. We live alone in a very real sense, but
we each have to die as if there were not another human being in the
whole universe but only ourselves. But the solitude may be a solitude
with God. Up there, alone with the stars and the sky and the
everlasting rocks and menacing death, Moses had for companion the
supporting God. That awful path is not too desolate and lonely to be
trodden if we tread it with Him.

Moses' lonely death leads to a society yonder. If you refer to the
thirty-second chapter you will find that, when he was summoned to the
mountain, God said to him, 'Die in the mount whither thou goest up, and
be gathered to thy people.' He was to be buried there, up amongst the
rocks of Moab, and no man was ever to visit his sepulchre to drop a
tear over it. How, then, was he 'gathered to his people'? Surely only
thus, that, dying in the desert alone, he opened his eyes in 'the
City,' surrounded by 'solemn troops and sweet societies' of those to
whom he was kindred. So the solitude of a moment leads on to blessed
and eternal companionship.

So far the death of Moses carries us. What does the other death say?
Moses had none but God with him when he died. There is a drearier
desolation than that, and Jesus Christ proved it when He cried, 'My
God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?' That was solitude indeed, and
in that hour of mysterious, and to us unfathomable, desertion and
misery, the lonely Christ sounded a depth, of which the lawgiver in His
death but skimmed the surface. Christ was parted from God in His death,
because He bore on Him the sins that separate us from our Father, and
in order that none of us may ever need to tread that dark passage