"Ah," you say, "you have still got to show God's goodness and kindness to me individually. My death may be for God's glory, it may be for the good of others; but how about me and those who mourn?" Well, now, look at it. You must get to the end of the story before you venture to judge the measure, the worth, of God's goodness. After all, was that period of sickness and death unmitigated gloom, and horror, and agony? Oh, I put it to you, men and women, who have passed through it, watching by the death of dear father or mother that loved the Lord and loved you, and whom you loved—dark, and sore, and painful enough at the time; but oh, if I called you to speak out, would you not say it was one of the most sacred periods of your life—the unspeakable tenderness, the sweet clinging love, the untiring service, the grateful responses, the sacredness that came into life? Ay, and when the tie was snapped, the new tenderness that you gave to the friends that are left, the new pledge binding you to heaven, and to hope for it, and long for it—death is not all an evil to our eyes. Death cannot ultimately be an evil, since it is universal—the consummation, climax, crown of every human life. Ah, if we had the grander majesty of soul to look at it from God's altitude, we should call death, not a defeat, but a victory, a triumph. I think sometimes that if death did not end these lives of ours, how weary they would get. Think of it—to live on for ever in the sordidness, in the littleness, in the struggle, the pain, the sin of this life of ours. Oh, we need that angel of death to come in, and now and then stir the pool of our family life, that there may be healing in it, that there may be blessing in it! Death, holding the hand of God through it, to those that stand by and see the sweetness of human love, the triumph of faith celestial, has a grandeur in it, like Christ's death on the cross; it hides out of sight of the people the ghastly, the doubt-creating features and elements of its external impediment—death becomes God's minister. It is going home to one's Father. Yes, but you want the guarantee that death is not the end, and that day it was right and lawful for Christ to give it, to anticipate the last great day, when in one unbroken army, radiant and resplendent, shining like jewels in a crown, He shall bring from the dark grave all that loved Him, fought for Him, and were loyal to Him on the road, and went down into the dark waters singly, one by one, in circumstances of ignominy often, and yet dying with Christ within them, the Resurrection and the Life.