Henry Scott Holland, Death Is Nothing at All

Recorded in January 2022. From "The King of Terrors," a sermon preached at St Paul's Cathedral on Sunday, the 15th of May, 1910. "The sermon was preached following the death of King Edward VII, whose coffin lay in state in Westminster Hall from 17 to 19 May, where it was viewed by about a quarter of a million people."

Further on in the sermon, Scott Holland makes the following interesting remarks on the feeling that "Death is nothing at all":

"Our high mood was real, though it passes. It was a true experience; it gave us authentic intelligence. We were better able to win an insight into the real heart of things as we stood there by the bedside of the dead in spiritual exaltation, with every capacity raised to its highest level, than now, when we are drawn under the drag of days, submerged, unnerved, wearied, out of spirits, disheartened. Therefore it is our reasonable act of faith to stand by our highest experience, and to assert its validity even when its light has faded out of our lives and we have sunk back under the shadows. Though we have returned to the twilight of the valleys, yet we will ever recall the moment when we stood upon the sunlit heights and saw the far horizons. It was a true value that we then gave to life and death. That act of insight cannot be disproved or discredited; even though there be a counter judgement which will not be gainsaid, and which still presses its conclusion and penetrating insistence."