V. 13. A voice said: "Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth." From henceforth, — yes, though you are thrown to the lions in the amphitheater, though you are daubed with pitch and burned for a torch-light at a garden party, though your head rolls from the block at the stroke of the executioner's axe, — yes even thus you are blessed a thousand times above your persecutors. These scenes and these exhortations evidently had special reference to the persecutions then being endured and further impending, but they come with the same force and applicability to every man in any age who lives his Christian life at the mouth of a fiery furnace.