centuries when speaking of the dread enemy,[1] bear curious witness to the new relation of the believer to the ancient foe of man; they spoke of death as "a passage into life"—as "a sleep." The spot where the dead were laid was now termed "a cemetery"—"a place of sleeping"; burial was called "depositio"—the body laid up as it were in trust.
Cyprian the saintly, the martyr Bishop of Carthage, well voices the feelings of Christians in the matter of death the friend:[2] "Let us think what we mean when we speak of the presence of Christ (after death), of the increasing hosts of our friends, the loved, the reverenced, the sainted who are there. Cyprian cannot even mourn the departed—he only misses them as friends gone on a long journey. He is unable to bear the putting on black garments of mourning, in memory of those who wear the fadeless white. "Put the terror of death quite away—think only of the deathlessness beyond." "Let us greet the day which gives to each of us his own country . . . which restores us to paradise. Who that has lived in foreign lands would not hasten to go back to his own country?. . . We look on paradise as our country."
The wondrous joy which came to the Christian in the assemblies we have been picturing—the fact of the new Brotherhood—the feeling of the presence of the Master in their midst, watching over them—has been already dwelt upon at some length.
The blessed consciousness of the forgiveness of all sin, the knowledge that in repentance and in prayer they could ever wash anew their scarred robes white in the blood of the Lamb, was a source of perpetual and ever-recurring joy to the earnest Christian. The doctrine of the atonement ever would give them constant comfort and confidence in all the difficulties and dangers of common everyday life—"Though their sins were as scarlet they would become white as snow," was an ancient Hebrew saying of Isaiah. It was one of the precious treasures inherited by the Christian from the Jewish Church. And in the sorely harassed and tempted life of the world of
