April 3

This is the promise . . . eternal life. — JOHN ii. 25.

Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death. — JOHN viii. 51.

NOTICE what we may call the majestic simplicity of the words of Scripture. It has been said that the grandest and most pregnant sentence in our language is, "And God said, let there be light: and there was light." Yet in that sentence there is not a word of more than one syllable. Fully as pregnant, more mysterious in meaning, yet as simple in form, is our text. "I say unto you." Here, as so often when a mighty truth is to come, the personality of Christ stands forth. Not, "men say," "it is said," "you all know," but "I say." I who came down from heaven, I who am the truth, I who have the keys of death and hell, I who am the Resurrection and the Life, say, "If a man keep my saying he shall never see death." This stupendous contradiction to the natural mind becomes a mine of light and truth to him whose soul the Spirit of God illumines. He who spake was soon to die after the flesh. He was speaking to dying men. What did he mean, then? That he who faithfully keeps the saying of Christ shall not see that death from which Christ came to deliver man, — the death of the soul, the death of condemnation in hell, the death which comes from separation from God, the only real death. To the Christian, death is a sleep, a passage from earth to paradise, an unconscious journey whose end is light; but to the sinner it is an awful catastrophe, the close of hope, the beginning of the end. Abraham was not dead, though for centuries in his tomb. But many who heard Christ with beating hearts and flowing veins were dead even while they lived, because they neither knew nor obeyed him.

Edward L. Stoddard

Death, no longer now we die, We but follow Christ on high.

GEORGE RAWSON.