Every remedy taken from materia medica, every operation of the surgeon’s knife that adds even a day to the sufferer’s existence, every hospital, every precaution and invention to prevent accident, all the genius exercised by man to conserve health and strength are a protest against death and a proclamation that it is unnatural, a discord and a wrong.
Every human being who has the slightest pulse of sentiment, who is not sunken in the soddenness of moral unconsciousness feels that death is the shadow shutting out the sun of day and hiding the stars of night, the false note that breaks the lilt in any song, the thief who takes the treasure no money can replace, the mocker who bids us readjust our days and live as though those whom we have loved and lost had never been a part of us, so that their going has put more of death in those of us who remain to live than life—even the brute beast feels and knows death is—an enemy.
Nor does God Himself leave us in any doubt about it.
He says death is an enemy; even as it is written:
“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
And since in itself it is an enemy, it is, necessarily, the work of an enemy.
It is the work of an enemy who has the power of death.
He who has the power of death is—the Devil; even as it is written:
“Him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.”
The Son of God came into the world that He might destroy the Devil and his work of death.