Brethren, with all the bitterness of such a moment, it is but a feeble image when placed by the side of the loneliness of death.  We die alone.  We go on our dark mysterious journey for the first time in all our existence, without one to accompany us.  Friends are beside our bed, they must stay behind.  Grant that a Christian has something like familiarity with the Most High, that breaks this solitary feeling; but what is it with the mass of men?  It is a question full of loneliness to them.  What is it they are to see?  What are they to meet?  Is it not true, that, to the larger number of this congregation, there is no one point in all eternity on which the eye can fix distinctly and rest gladly—­nothing beyond the grave, except a dark space into which they must plunge alone?

And yet my brethren, with all these ideas no doubt vividly before his mind, it was none of them that the apostle selected as the crowning bitterness of dying.  It was not the thought of surrendering existence.  It was not the parting from all bright and lovely things.  It was not the shudder of sinking into the sepulchre alone.  “The sting of death is sin.”

Now there are two ways in which this deep truth applies itself.  There is something that appals in death when there are distinct separate acts of guilt resting on the memory; and there is something too in the possession of a guilty heart, which is quite another thing from acts of sin, that makes it an awful thing to die.  There are some who carry about with them the dreadful secret of sin that has been done; guilt that has a name.  A man has injured some one; he has made money, or got on by unfair means; he has been unchaste; he has done some of those thousand things of life which leave upon the heart the dark spot that will not come out.  All these are sins which you can count up and number.  And the recollection of things like these is that agony which we call remorse.  Many of us have remembrances of this kind which are fatal to serenity.  We shut them out, but it will not do.  They bide their time, and then suddenly present themselves, together with the thought of a judgment-seat.  When a guilty man begins to think of dying, it is like a vision of the Son of Man presenting itself and calling out the voices of all the unclean spirits in the man—­“Art thou come to torment us before the time?”

But my brethren, it is a mistake if we suppose that is the common way in which sin stings at the thought of death.  Men who have lived the career of passionate life have distinct and accumulated acts of guilt before their eyes.  But with most men it is not guilty acts, but guiltiness of heart that weighs the heaviest.  Only take yesterday as a specimen of life.  What was it with most of us?  A day of sin.  Was it sin palpable and dark, such as we shall remember painfully this day year?  Nay my brethren, unkindness, petulance,