where around us, and which we ourselves feel. If you open your eyes upon the annals of time, you see an unbroken series of existencies who appear for a few days, or hours, on this scene of action, and then pass away. The cradle is suffused with their tears, and, in a little while, the places that so lately knew them, are hung around with the emblems of their dissolution. And between the cradle and the grave, what mournful scenes fill up the drama of human life! What hours of sadness and gloom! What painful diseases, what disheartening discouragements, what disappointments and losses; what defeated hopes and withered honours; what depression and melancholy; what malignity of enemies and fickleness of friends; what unkindness, darkness, and fear; what individual and domestic calamity, and public distress; what consternation and dismay; all heightened and aggravated by the distressing doubt and uncertainty as to what shall be on the morrow! Trials like these befall us at every step through life. No hour can we be free from the fear that what we value most on earth may be snatched from us. In this respect, man seems subjected to a severer sentence than the rest of the natural world, and the curse of death falls with a heavier weight upon him. The trees and plants grow up to their full height, fill up the measure of their years, and then decay and fall. Flowers bloom through their passing life, and then wither and die according to the laws of their nature. Birds and beasts live, for the most part, until age creeps upon them, and, unless they are destroyed by the hand of man, are rarely cut off by disease. The brute creation have no thought, no fear of evil. Their life is not embittered by the expectation that they must die; they have no knowledge beyond the present and the past; their hopes and their fears gather nothing from their experience which may reveal to them the morrow; but they live in contented ignorance and apathy, and at death sink into the deep, never-ending night of annihilation. Man perishes from But it is not so with man. the cradle to the grave; and "suffers a thousand deaths in fearing one." He alone is aware of the dangers that threaten him, and they are every where about his path. "Man dieth and wasteth away, yea, man giveth up the ghost, and where is he ?” Who has not sympathized with the Persian poet, when he said, "I passed the burying-place, and wept sorely, To think how many of my friends were in the mansions of the dead. And in an agony of grief, I cried out, Where are they? How often do we grieve over the destruction of our fondest hopes? When heart is bound up in heart, how oft is the tie rent suddenly asunder, the sweetest fellowships severed, and the joys of the happiest life veiled by the gloom of the grave. Life and death seem to walk hand in hand; and even while we are rejoicing in the presence of the one, comes his stern companion and casts a blight upon our prospects. Amid those very scenes where we have witnessed the joyful career of one we love, we are called to behold him pine in sickness and suffer in death. The hand which has performed for us so many acts of kindness, is now reached out to us for aid that we cannot give; and the voice whose tones were such music to the ear, can now scarcely be heard, or heard only in sounds of distress. All which formerly made the delight our hearts, now makes up their anguish. And if in hope of soothing their dying pillow, we summon strength, and stand by to receive the last sigh, to return the last weak pressure of the hand, to watch the advance of death as he steals from the cold limbs and brow to the heart, and freezes there the feeble current of life, and then gaze upon the lifeless form for another breath, another motion, which, alas! we shall not hear, nor see; we feel, for the moment, as though this grief, this overwhelming sorrow, could not be supported. When, too, after the first hour of anguish is past, and we return to that cold clay to put it in order for the tomb, to look still again upon its changed lineaments, and to feel that it was but yesterday and there was a bloom upon this cheek, a lustre in this eye, a voice upon these lips; we are mourners afresh-we are silent-the sad picture is all before us! Seal up this sacred volume, and I see not whence the light dawns to cheer this sombre picture. But for the Bible, man would be placed in a grade of happiness far below the brutes that perish. Better be any thing than rational, without the religion of the Bible. The Scriptures inform me that these evils have a cause. They all come from the hand of God. "I make peace, I create evil, I the Lord do all these things." Chance and fate have no place in the government of "the God only wise." Sorrow is designed; nor is the design malignant, or unkind. The unseen hand that inflicts these trials is as benevolent as it is wise, and the Being who dispenses them is as far above all other beings in goodness, as he is in power. We learn from the Bible too, that they have a moral cause; that they are the rebuke of the Holy One for our iniquity; that they are the discipline of a heavenly parent, and designed to bring back his wayward children to their forsaken God. And when rebellious man sees and feels this truth, his soul is subdued to submission, to tranquillity, to peace, and under the heaviest calamity he looks upward and says, "It is the Lord, let him do what seemeth him good!" And this of itself is the source of abounding consolations. How often in our intercourse with mankind do we cheerfully submit to present pain and evil, when counselled to it by those in whose wisdom and benevolence we have confidence. Extend this principle, so often and so beautifully illustrated in the word of God, to all the evils of the present life, and we have that feeling of quiet, trusting confidence which supports the believer under all the evils which an all-wise Father is pleased to lay upon him. It is a principle prolific in consolations to the mourner; and well may be the confidence and joy of the world and of the universe. "The Lord reigneth, let the earth rejoice; let the multitude of the isles be glad thereof.” And what shall we say of the hopes and prospects by which the Bible cheers the hearts of the bereaved? What rather may we not say? Is it blind conjecture which the Scriptures reveal respecting the state of departed man? Is there no life to come? no great resurrection? no comforter to arrest the current of "mourning, lamentation and wo," after the dust we love has been deposited in the tomb? When reminded keenly of our loss we exclaim, Shall we not meet again? Is this parting forever?-is there nothing in the Bible that can answer the agonizing inquiry? When we wander as it were along the borders of that vast ocean which has swallowed up our living treasures; when we sit down there, and weep and call upon the waves of eternity to give up their dead; when from the shore of time, we look and listen over the vast abyss of waters, does no sound reach us? To the ear of faith there is a voice. We listen, and our grief is allayed. "For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him.” They do but "sleep." They "sleep in Jesus." Death dissolves not their union with him. Yes, |
