for—­it is a matter of impossibility that he can be free from doubts.  He must make up his mind for a dark life.  Doubts can only be dispelled by that kind of active life that realizes Christ.  And there is no faith that gives a victory so steadily triumphant as that.  When such a man comes near the opening of the vault, it is no world of sorrows he is entering upon.  He is only going to see things that he has felt, for he has been living in heaven.  He has his grasp on things that other men are only groping after and touching now and then.  Live above this world, Brethren, and then the powers of the world to come are so upon you that there is no room for doubt.

Besides all this, it is a Christian’s privilege to have victory over the fear of death.  And here it is exceedingly easy to paint what after all is only the image-picture of a dying hour.  It is the easiest thing to represent the dying Christian as a man who always sinks into the grave full of hope, full of triumph, in the certain hope of a blessed resurrection.  Brethren, we must paint things in the sober colours of truth; not as they might be supposed to be, but as they are.  Often that is only a picture.  Either very few death-beds are Christian ones, or else triumph is a very different thing from what the word generally implies.  Solemn, subdued, full of awe and full of solemnity, is the dying hour generally of the holiest men:  sometimes almost darkness.—­Rapture is a rare thing, except in books and scenes.

Let us understand what really is the victory over fear.  It may be rapture or it may not.  All that depends very much on temperament; and after all, the broken words of a dying man are a very poor index of his real state before God.  Rapturous hope has been granted to martyrs in peculiar moments.  It is on record of a minister of our own Church, that his expectation of seeing God in Christ became so intense as his last hour drew near, that his physician was compelled to bid him calm his transports, because in so excited a state he could not die.  A strange unnatural energy was imparted to his muscular frame by his nerves overstrung with triumph.  But brethren, it fosters a dangerous feeling to take cases like those as precedents.  It leads to that most terrible of all unrealities—­the acting of a death-bed scene.  A Christian conqueror dies calmly.  Brave men in battle do not boast that they are not afraid.  Courage is so natural to them that they are not conscious they are doing anything out of the common way—­Christian bravery is a deep, calm thing, unconscious of itself.  There are more triumphant death-beds than we count, if we only remember this—­true fearlessness makes no parade.

Oh, it is not only in those passionate effusions in which the ancient martyrs spoke sometimes of panting for the crushing of their limbs by the lions in the amphitheatre, or of holding out their arms to embrace the flames that were to curl round