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the throne of his glory, as the Judge of the world, and to all those who are in Christ will he pronounce the joyful sentence, "Come, ye blessed children of my Father, receive the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." May we all strive with God's assisting grace, to be amongst those whom the Lord thus delighteth to honor and to bless; may we seek that faith in Christ, which worketh by love, and be numbered with his saints in everlasting glory.

"The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore." Amen.

In this benediction we pray that the merits of Christ, the love of the Father, and the aid of the Holy Spirit, may secure and protect us in our passage through

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this sublunary world, and bring us at last to the haven where we would be. In the course of the foregoing service we have triumphant Hymns over death, taken from the Holy Scriptures, Psalms, and then a Lesson from St. Paul, then a Thanksgiving for our departed brother's delivery out of a world of sin and misery, and a Prayer for our own resurrection to newness of life, and our consummation in glory at the last day. By all which prayers, praises, and holy lessons, and decent solemnities we glorify God, honor the dead, and comfort the living. We should not remain at the grave weeping; we should go home silently, and study how by faith and holiness, we may arrive at that felicity to which we hope the deceased is gone before us; our secret meditation and study would now, by God's blessing, be profitably exercised,

if we would without delay, turn to his own most holy word, and particularly to those parts which the church has selected and interwoven in her most solemn and impressive service, at which we have been just attending; and if the Lord vouchsafe to pardon and amend us, we may courageously meet death ourselves, and patiently bear it in others, till they and we are awakened by the voice of Jesus, and received into his everlasting kingdom.

POSTSCRIPT.

A WRITER of no common fame, but, it must be owned, not so often appealed to for his Theology, as his Metaphysics, has well observed on that fine exclamation of the Apostle in his celebrated chapter on the Resurrection, so properly introduced into our Funeral Service,"O Death, where is thy sting! O Grave, where is thy victory!" that it has something of the air of a song of triumph, which St. Paul breaks out into, upon a

view of the saint's victory over death, in a state wherein death is never to have

place any more. And here I may further incidentally remark that the same Writer, commenting on the forty-fourth verse, seems to be of opinion that the word "a natural body," should more suitably, to the propriety of the original language, and more conformably to the Apostle's meaning, be translated "an animal body," for that which St. Paul is doing, is to shew, that as we have animal bodies now, (which we derived from Adam) endowed with an animal life, which, unless supported with a constant supply of food and air, will fail and perish, and at last, do what we can, will dissolve and come to an end; so, at the Resurrection we shall have from Christ, the second Adam, spiritual bodies," which shall have an essential

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