The Persian monarch forbidding sackcloth had forgotten that
consolation is a royal prerogative; but the King of kings has not
forgotten this, and very sweet and availing is His sovereign sympathy.
Scherer recommends "amusement as a comfortable deceit by which we
avoid a permanent _tête-à-tête_ with realities that are too heavy for
us." Is there not a more excellent way than this? Let us carry our
sorrows to Christ, and we shall find that in Him they have lost their
sting. It is a clumsy mistake to call Christianity a religion of
sorrow--it is a religion _for_ sorrow. Christ finds us stricken and
afflicted, and His words go down to the depths of our sorrowful heart,
healing, strengthening, rejoicing with joy unspeakable. He finds us
in sackcloth; He clothes us with singing-robes, and crowns us with
everlasting joy.

III. We consider the recognition by revelation of death. We have,
again, adroit ways of shutting the gate upon that sackcloth which is
the sign of death. A recent writer allows that Shakespeare, Raleigh,
Bacon, and all the Elizabethans shuddered at the horror and mystery
of death; the sunniest spirits of the English Renaissance quailed to
think of it. He then goes on to observe that there was something in
this fear of the child's vast and unreasoned dread of darkness and
mystery, and such a way of viewing death has become obsolete through
the scientific and philosophic developments of the later centuries.
Walt Whitman also tells us "that nothing can happen more beautiful
than death," and he has exprest the humanist view of mortality in
a hymn which his admirers regard as the high-water mark of modern
poetry. But will this rhapsody bear thinking about? Is death
"delicate, lovely and soothing," "delicious," coming to us with
"serenades"? Does death "lave us in a flood of bliss"? Does "the body
gratefully nestle close to death"? Do we go forth to meet death "with