We know what Hezekiah felt when his back was turned on death, and he came up to life again. But what did he feel when he faced the other way, and his back was to life? With his back to life and facing deathwards, Hezekiah saw nothing, that was worth hoping for. To him to die was to leave God behind him, to leave the face of God as surely as he was leaving the face of man. _I said, I shall not see Jah, Jah in the land of the living; I shall gaze upon man no more with the inhabitants of the world._ The beyond was not to Hezekiah absolute nothingness, for he had his conceptions, the popular conceptions of his time, of a sort of existence that was passed by those who had been men upon earth. The imagination of his people figured the gloomy portals of a nether world--_Sheol_, the _Hollow_ (Dante's "hollow realm"), or perhaps the _Craving_--into which death herds the shades of men, bloodless, voiceless, without love or hope or aught that makes life worth living. With such an existence beyond, to die to life here was to Hezekiah like as when a weaver rolls up the finished web. My life may be a pattern for others to copy, a banner for others to fight under, but for me it is finished. Death has cut it from the loom. Or it was like going into captivity. _Mine age is removed and is carried away from me into exile, like a shepherd's tent_--exile which to a Jew was the extreme of despair, implying as it did absence from God, and salvation and the possibility of worship. _Sheol cannot praise Thee; death cannot celebrate Thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for Thy faithfulness._ Of this then at the best Hezekiah was sure: a respite of fifteen years--nothing beyond. Then the shadow would not return upon the dial; and as the king's eyes closed upon the dear faces of his friends, his sense of the countenance of God would die too, and his soul slip into the abyss, hopeless of God's faithfulness. It is this awful anticlimax, which makes us feel the difference Christ has made. This saint stood in almost the clearest light that revelation cast before Jesus. He was able to perceive in suffering a meaning and derive from it a strength not to be exceeded by any Christian. Yet his faith is profitable for this life alone. For him character may wrestle with death over and over again, and grow the stronger for every grapple, but death wins the last throw.