separate us from the love of Christ?" (Rom. viii. 33-35). Can we, in some feeble measure, enter into the full meaning of this chapter, and make its glorious terminating challenge our own? Can we sing the wondrous song of victory with its opening and closing keynote " IN CHRIST"? The world LIFE "shall not separate!" to ruin; the stars may fall from their orbits; or rather, nature's funeral pile must be lighted; Creation, hoary with years, must in due time succumb to the inevitable laws of decadence. There is the same transience in the more sacred provinces of life. Earthly relationships and friendships are at the best fickle, mutable, arbitrary. Change they may, perish at some time they must. Not so is the bond of fellowship uniting us with Christ. There are no such precarious ties and tenures here; no such sorrowful farewells. It is union beyond the reach of change and peril, chance and vicissitude. "He alone," says Augustine, "never loseth what is dear to him, to whom all things are dear in Him who is never lost!" DEATH shall not separate. Death! What! that which is so sadly and irrevocably allied with the thought of separation! Yet here too, in the noblest sense of it, separation there is not, and cannot be. "I give unto them eternal life, and they shall never perish." At what is truly misnamed 'the closing hour,' Being (immortal being) is only interrupted: no, not even is it suspended, but rather transferred, exalted, perfected. The stream of existence is indeed for the moment lost from view; but not as the river of Palestine is lost in the gloomy depths of the Dead Sea, shut up in that gleamless caldron with no exit or emergence; but lost, rather as the river of Egypt is said to lose itself in the sands, to reappear when it joins the ocean. That river, hidden for a time, will emerge living and life-giving on the shores of the illimitable sea, to lose and merge its waters in the Eternal Ocean of divine love. For, to repeat a verse oft quoted in previous pages-but which is specially appropriate here it is "the Life hid with Christ in God; AND when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory" (Col. iii. 3, 4). Separated: yes, but it is only as the disciples were separated from their dear Lord after the Resurrection. We all remember the night on the Sea of Tiberias; the thought of its unremunerated toil mingling with sadder, deeper, more sacred ponderings on His absence. But, as morning with its faint earliest ray dawns on the silvery beach, there stands a well-known Figure. There is heard a well-known Voice, welcoming them as "children" to the meal already prepared,-"It is the Lord!" So with the believer and death with its night of tossing on the tempestuous waves. But, ere long, the darkness is past; and lo! on the Heavenly shore, there is a Voice heard inviting to sit down at the banquet of love; and, better than that on earthly lakeside, a banquet with "no separation : "-"It is the Lord" FOR EVER! Death has somewhere been called one of the "gates of pearl" spoken of in Revelation. Not so, is it, assuredly, from the earthly view. No: there, it is rather a gloomy portal; stern, repulsive, iron-barred. But seen by angels, and the saintly multitude from "the other side,"-" Every several gate was of one pearl" (Rev. xxi. 21). Let us seek to habituate ourselves to this view of death" death IN CHRIST." An enemy truly, but 'the last enemy.' Then, in whatever shape it may overtake us; whether in the quiet slumber of our own chamber -a peaceful departure tended by the hands of loving affection; or the slow ravages of wasting disease, the wild delirium of raging fever, the crash of some sudden and unforeseen calamity,-we shall be able, like Paul, not, perhaps, as in his case, with a pæan of triumph, but under the sublime consciousness of being IN CHRIST, with simple confiding faith to say-"I am persuaded " that death. . . shall not "separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." "C And so shall we ever be WITH THE LORD!" CHRISTO XXVIII. NO SEPARATION IN CHRIST. "For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is IN CHRIST JESUS OUR LORD."-Rom. viii. 38, 39. "The salvation which is IN CHRIST JESUS with eternal glory."— 2 Tim. ii. 10. I N our former meditation we found the Apostle uttering the exultant challenge and "per suasion," that nought-no circumstances of Life; no, nor Death itself; no created thing, no created being, could ever separate him from the love of God. And the ground of that challenge-the guarantee of inviolable security, was derived from his now familiar monogram-the realised mystical union and fellowship with his divine Lord. He is especially emphatic in its avowal. His words in the original are more expressive than in our rendering.1 The love'-'the special love'-(Ts) "Here plainly enough God's love to us in Christ,—to us as we are IN CHRIST" (Alford). The completed work of the Great Surety, His cross and passion, His glorious resurrection, His triumphal ascension, His prevailing intercession:-varied links in the golden chain spoken of in succession in the same chapter, place the salvation of the child of God beyond the possibility of failure or disaster. Who shall, who can, who dare separate? In the words of a gifted writer, "The movables may go; the birthright and inheritance cannot. . . . He that loved them out of darkness will love them into everlasting light." ... "How happy," says Pascal, in language very appropriate to the present remarks, "is the soul who finds his delight in Thee, since he may abandon himself to Thy love. How firm and lasting is his happiness, since his hope cannot be disappointed, because Thou wilt never be destroyed, and neither life nor death shall separate him from the object of his desires." Not, (to repeat the qualifying remark made in more than one previous meditation) that that triumphant song of the Apostle can always be sung with unfaltering lip, or the vessel of faith be borne ever onward with propitious breezes over summer seas. No:: the normal description and expression of the spiritual as of the natural life rather is, "the day is neither clear nor dark" (Zech. xiv. 7). Like the shipmen of old in the Sea of Adria, there are times when "neither sun nor stars in many days appear, and no small tempest lay on us" (Acts xxvii. 20). Towards the close of the very chapter from which our motto |