now the year of our dullest days-the date of our most trifling communications. And now that the future is become the present, it occupies our attention, and is so closely bound up with our consciousness, that we are too apt to feel it the only time worth caring for.

The concerns of those earlier years which touched us so deeply, how trifling they seem in retrospect! The stir we then made about many things ended long ago in sheer indifference! What a web of finest hopes we spun-just to glisten in the light of fancy for a few days; and how we trembled when anything drew near that threatened to mar our work! And yet it was long since all unravelled by the same eager hand, or it lies neglected-an old material quite out of use, unless it can in any way promote present purposes. How could we have given ourselves up to that sorrow ?-it proved so needless; and the cares that kept us waking were not about the things that brought us afterwards most woe; what waste of time and waste of peace there was!

So we think, looking back upon bygones; and with that very word we bury many a past disquietude. And is it not strange, that though we know the same lullaby will apply to present cares before long, yet we can find nothing to quiet them now? We cannot imagine the future to be as real, as urgent, and as crowded with interests as this importunate now. Beyond the range of our present hopes and fears, it is too dim to hold the mind by any strong attraction; it is baffling to thought, and can only be looked at stedfastly by faith and reason..

Of the dimness and uncertainty of all earthly things yet to come, few people can need to be reminded; not only such as arise from sudden changes of fortune, but those minute vicissitudes which are of daily occurrence, so as to justify the saying that "nothing is certain except what is unexpected." One thing only is certain, one thing only it is as safe to predict as to record any fact of the past-so long as this world shall last, death will be the fate of all. Sooner or later a new year will come to others, but not to us; it will be full of activity and

earthly progress to those who live on; but we shall be unseen, our state unknown, and our hidden lot little thought of, for we shall be numbered with the dead.

All that poets, teachers, and philosophers have repeated on this subject, fails to exhaust its ever-new amazement. Death, let it come when and how it will, is always a terrific surprise to those who witness its work. It is always with fresh dismay that we find the spirit goneutter, unresisting helplessness in the body, once so quick in selfdefence; powerlessness over all its forsaken possessions; coldness; and at length corruption, where a few short days before the tongue was eloquent, and every feature warmed by feeling or intelligence, and every member sensitive to the least injury, exposure, or neglect. The desertion is so sudden and complete, that for a long time it seems hardly credible; and when believed, the living revolt from the sight

of so ghastly a ruin, and we naturally think that some tremendous experience has overtaken and absorbed the absent spirit, or that surely it would still give some attention to the body, gradually loosening the tie to that which once shared with it all the honours of identity.

Now we know that at any moment we may be snatched from visible life, and thrown immediately into another state of being. We know that this may happen without the slightest warning; and that very often it does happen, that men vanish from out of the city before time enough has elapsed since their last transaction for any one to miss them, or wonder where they are; and yet so closely is the spirit involved with its perishable associate, that it seldom feels any lively anticipation of their certain severance; it is so lulled by the habitual sameness of life in the body, as to have little inclination for thoughts of that unknown life without the body, to which we are all so near. May God be merciful to all among us who are now unready, to the slothful who will not sow, and the evil-minded who are sowing poisonous seed! May God still sustain the patience and faith of those who continue in well-doing, though sorely pressed by care, and grief, and temptation! At this instant, who knows of which soul it is said, "Yet a little while, and the time of her harvest is near." And that harvest is coming towards us as gradually, as softly, and as inevitably, as this time-this new year has already come.

But we do not much think of this: it seems as little likely as the sudden break off of a dream that intensely occupies us; we only believe that it was a dream when daylight wakes us to another state of consciousness. This figure is not too strong: however high our aims, or holy our life, the life of the senses which, for God's good purposes we are here obliged to lead, must necessarily suspend the life of the real being, and deaden, in great measure, much of its spiritual perception. If our Maker had not given to the natural man reason, and to the spiritual man faith, this life of the senses would entirely absorb us, and we should not believe in any other; for as certainly as our visual prospects depend on the locality of the body, do our mental views alter with the times in which we consciously exist; and from our daily lifesuch as it is-we inevitably regard things from a very different point of view from that we shall take, when looking back upon them at the day of our death. It by no means follows as a matter of course (according to my apprehension) that the one view is necessarily more correct than the other; but, as then we shall be for ever leaving a state which is spoken of in the Word of God as "walking in vain shadows," we have good reason for assuming that when this life ends we gain a clearer light. And therefore it is but rational and prudent-on the lowest ground-to inquire diligently what will that new daylight reveal?

If any one begins to speak to us of our own death, we think “of course of course;" but we soon let the thought drop, as other subjects of immediate importance press upon our attention. Yet if this goes on-and every day has its own little circle of importances-if this goes on till death is closer than all of them, till the hour strikes for the business which death has to transact with us,-the sealing up of every word and work,-then the stroke falls upon an unready soul: no outcry, no effort can arrest it, and all that we ourselves are is at once "fixed and frozen to permanence."

Suppose that stroke came now, could we endure what we are now, in our inmost being, to be perpetuated? The question has been asked a hundred times; over and over again the warning has been sounded; and yet would it were in my power to give it additional emphasis !

I strive to use all means of rousing myself and others to a feeling of death's nearness, and yet am aware that no words can do what one moment's apprehension of immediate death would instantly effect: for truly that is a revelation.

There are certain unquestioned truths which are in every mouth, and still need an ever-recurring iteration, as solemn and impressive as eloquence can make it, because they are for ever escaping from inward consciousness; always liable to fade from our thoughts, and so practically effete that we feel and act as if we never knew them. Of this number is the knowledge of the certainty of death, and its possible suddenness; and the knowledge of a Divine government from which no contingency, however trifling or however tragical, can for a second withdraw any created being. These truths we believe, profess, and teach with the intellect, while too generally by feeling and action we gainsay them. And naturally enough, for the experience of every day is apparently strong in their disproof; and it sometimes needs the experience of a life to give them complete verification. We go on living day after day; we feel nothing like death for years and years; it is only at the end of many varying times that the fatal decree sets at nought all former experience; we know and feel that we must die; and before we can turn back to tell those around us what death teaches, we are in another inaccessible state, and have no power or sound in the world just hurried through-have left a helpless, loathsome framework, which men must hasten to bury out of their sight; and then the place that knew us knows us no more, and those who loved us grieve till they come to lie down in the dust together with us.

But because death is every hour possible, and yet does not overtake us, we feel as if it was improbable. Strange! that when every invention, every attempt of the living is based upon the works of the dead-as many and as thickly accumulated one upon another as the cells of defunct insects in a piece of madrepore-strange! that we feel this life

the important condition, and death, contingent indeed, but unlooked for and kept out of sight; that living as we do on the débris of other lives, poring delighted over the memoirs of their extinct passions and long-past toils, we yet so faintly anticipate our own certain change, when all the "thirsty cares" which to-day "drink up the spirit" will become ridiculously obsolete, and all the events of our lives but the dim remembrance of a once interesting tale. Oh! let us to-day, while it is called to-day, think seriously what death will do!

Death and life are sometimes compared to sea and shore ;-but the waves bring to our feet some portion of their acquisitions; of their wrecks they show some sign. The dead do not so; they go from of them we know absolutely nothing more.

"The myriads swarming on the earth

Are few beside its dead;

Yet for himself each unit man

Must solve death's problem dread.

"No past experience can avail,

Dumb are the graves beneath;

Past lives of countless millions fail

To wed one life with death."*

us, and

The dark, still night, into which a person goes out from a house full of light and movement, gives one a better image of our ignorance of all that follows upon dying; would that we might perceive even as much of the dead as we do of retreating footsteps!

While we live, the conjunction of soul and body seems so perfect, they appear in action so truly one, that the mind can hardly believe such union only transient companionship; to the embodied, the rupture of this intimate conjunction must ever appear wonderful and terrific. And when any one among us dies suddenly, we who are left are ready to suppose that it was not so sudden a death as it appeared to be; we persuade ourselves, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that there was some secret notice of the approaching change, some foreboding, some alarming sensation, warning the soul to prepare for death. So will our friends speak, guessing about us, who now plan what we shall do next summer, and forecast the anxieties of an after year, if, while we talk of these things, some tiny part of our intricate bodily mechanism goes wrong' unperceived, and the heart stops, and the breath and the spirit pass away without a moment's notice; and those who look on ask curiously one of another if any difference of look or manner had been observed? Ah! what difference need be waited for while we live in such bodies as these, and who can plead any want of warning? Could the word of our Maker be more explicit than it is upon this point

* H. Schütz Wilson.

of man's mortality? or could experience be more emphatic in giving its alarm than the common experience of our day? For with the increase of all other knowlege, how greatly increased is our knowledge of the variety and frequency of death!

"You that are now so idly busie in gathering together the treasurie of your ant-hillock, and building children's tottering piles, doe you forget that the foot of death is coming to spurn it all abroad, and tread down you and it together? You spend the day of life and visitation in painting your phantasies with the images of felicity, and in dressing yourselves, and feathering your nest, with that which you impiously steal from God; and doe you forget that the night of blacknesse is at hand, when God will undresse you of your temporary contents, and deprive you of your borrowed bravery? How easily! how speedily! how certainly will He doe it!"*

From the position taken by this eloquent writer, declamation is easy; but when we wish to make his argument bear upon every heart, we find some difficulty in separating the effects of panic-stricken ignorance from those of just alarm.

The most devout person is often startled when observing the incongruity of every-day life with that day when this life ends;-the vain absorption, as it appears, in all that death will make insignificant-the fearful abruptness of transition from a thousand mundane cares to a state with which (as we suppose) they have no connexion. And even when piety sanctifies every employment, this transition still seems so awful, that it is a common thing for those to whom disease has showed their death-warrant, to try and alienate themselves from earthly interests, and to avoid all that is likely to distract their attention from the coming change. This is called preparing for death. know not if those who thus endeavour to make ready find it possible to keep ever in sight that unimaginable crisis; or whether they can release the heart from its worldly affections, by seclusion and a strict regimen of mental abstinence. Except for those who can no otherwise gain undisturbed time for thought and prayer, and searching selfexamination, I should not think that this mode of preparation was the

"Set thy house in order, for thou must die, and not live," admonishes us what to do when death is close at hand; but if the affairs of this life are arranged, and all in our power is made ready for departure, I doubt if a continual dwelling upon it is to be desired. If it be, and if in order to prepare for death we ought to have less interest in the things of this life, let us not lose an hour in trying to reduce this interest: while we are in health, let us labour to keep death steadily in view. What holds good of the invalid, languishing from fatal malady, is equally applicable to the strongest and youngest among us.

* Baxter.