There is no greater mystery in life than in death. We talk as though the riddle of life only need engage us; this is not so; death is just as great a miracle as life; the one is two and two making five, the other is five splitting into two and two. Solve either, and we have solved the other; they should be studied not apart, for they are never parted, but together, and they will tell more tales of one another than either will tell about itself. If there is one thing which advancing knowledge makes clearer than another, it is that death is swallowed up in life, and life in death; so that if the last enemy that shall be subdued is death, then indeed is our salvation nearer than what we thought, for in strictness there is neither life nor death, nor thought nor thing, except as figures of speech, and as the approximations which strike us for the time as most convenient. There is neither perfect life nor perfect death, but a being ever with the Lord only, in the eternal φορα, or going to and fro and heat and fray of the universe. When we were young we thought the one certain thing was that we should one day come to die; now we know the one certain thing to be that we shall never wholly do so. _Non omnis moriar_, says Horace, and “I die daily,” says St. Paul, as though a life beyond the grave, and a death on this side of it, were each some strange thing which happened to them alone of all men; but who dies absolutely once for all, and for ever at the hour that is commonly called that of death, and who does not die daily and hourly? Does any man in continuing to live from day to day or moment to moment, do more than continue in a changed body, with changed feelings, ideas, and aims, so that he lives from moment to moment only in virtue of a simultaneous dying from moment to moment also? Does any man in dying do more than, on a larger and more complete scale, what he has been doing on a small one, as the most essential factor of his life, from the day that he became “he” at all? When the note of life is struck the harmonics of death are sounded, and so, again, to strike death is to arouse the infinite harmonics of life that rise forthwith as incense curling upwards from a censer. If in the midst of life we are in death, so also in the midst of death we are in life, and whether we live or whether we die, whether we like it and know anything about it or no, still we do it to the Lord—living always, dying always, and in the Lord always, the unjust and the just alike, for God is no respecter of persons.