VI.
The Sleeper.
“Our friend Lazarus sleepeth.”—The hopes and fears which alternately rose and fell in the bosoms of the sisters, like the surges of the ocean, are now at rest. Oft and again, we may well believe, had they gone, like the mother of Sisera, to the lattice to watch the return of the messenger, or, what was better, to hail their expected Lord. Gazing on the pale face at their side, and remembering that ere now the tidings of his illness must have reached Bethabara, they may have even expected to witness the power of a distant word;—to behold the hues of returning health displacing the ghastly symptoms of dissolution. But in vain! The curtain has fallen! Their season of aching anxiety is at an end. Their worst fears are realised.—“Lazarus sleepeth.”
How calm, how tranquil that departure! Never did sun sink so gently in its crimson couch—never did child, nestling in its mother’s bosom, close its eyes more sweetly!
“His summon’d breath went forth as peacefully
As folds the spent rose when the day is done.”
Befitting close to a calm and noiseless existence! It would seem as if the guardian angels who had been hovering round his death-pillow had well-nigh reached the gates of glory ere the sorrowing survivors discovered that the clay tabernacle was all that was left of a “brother beloved!”
From the abrupt manner in which, in the course of the narrative, our Lord makes the announcement to His disciples,[10] we are almost led to surmise that He did so at the very moment of the spirit’s dismissal—the Redeemer speaks while the eyelids are just closing, and the emancipated soul is winging its arrowy flight up to the spirit-land!
Death a Sleep!—How beautiful the image! Beautifully true, and only true regarding the Christian. It is here where the true and the false—Christianity and Paganism—meet together in impressive and significant contrast. The one comes to the dark river with her pale, sickly lamp. It refuses to burn—the damps of Lethe dim and quench it. Philosophy tries to discourse on death as a “stern necessity”—of the duty of passing heroically into this mysterious, oblivion-world—taking with bold heart “the leap in the dark,” and confronting, as we best can, blended images of annihilation and terror.