Death reigns, and day by day he is sweeping in new multitudes into his silent realm. The mightiest and the meanest alike must yield to him who is the terror of kings, no less than he is the king of terrors. At one time he rides on the hurricane, and dashes the laboring vessel and the freighted souls within her on the roaring reef; at another he drives through the city streets riding on his pestilential car, and spreads desolation round him. Now he careers upon the boiling flood, and sweeps whole villages before him into swift destruction; and again he leaps in the lightning-flash upon some devoted building, and kindles a conflagration that burns many in its flames. He laughs at men’s efforts to elude his grasp; and as we look upon the settled countenance of the loved one whom we are preparing to lay in the grave, we are almost compelled to own him conqueror. But no! “there is another king, one Jesus,” who is “the Resurrection and the Life,” and “who hath abolished death and brought life and immortality to light by the Gospel.” Let us, then, be undismayed by this last enemy. He is a vanquished foe. Our Lord Jesus has gone into his domain, and having conquered him there, has brought him back with him to his palace, to be there the page who opens the door for his friends into the chamber of his presence. Yes! as we stand by the remains of our Christian dead, and under the influence of sight are moved to speak of Death as king, we recall in another sense than they were meant, but in a sense which faith recognizes as true, the words “There is another king, one Jesus.” Paradoxical as it may seem, these two things always go together. Where Christ is owned as the sole sovereign, there his service is perfect freedom; but where his supremacy is either ignored or given to another, there comes the slavery of superstition, or the tyranny of priestcraft, or the cold domination of philosophy, and it is hard to say which of these is the most degrading.—_W. M. Taylor._ [_April 26._]