set on their graves. Events have shown that in our individual history, that year was not to have this eminence. Whether to any specified individual this eminence among the years, shall belong to the one on which we have now entered, is known to no human being. To some of us, it will have that eminence, and before its close the record on the tomb will tell the passing stranger, that this was the year on which we learned what it is to die and stand before God.

We have entered on another year. We endeavor to cheer each other, in a world that we all feel to be full of dangers and sorrows, by mutual congratulations and kind wishes for the future. I will not attempt to penetrate the future. I would not know it if I could. I will not damp the ardor of your joyous anticipations. I will not now dwell on the prospect that many of the tender ties which bind us together, before the close of this year will be broken; that many of our hearts will bleed; that many of these eyes will run down with tears. If I live I shall see all this soon enough ;if I die, you will see it in me. But I will not anticipate it now. I will join in your felicitations and wishes for happiness and prosperity. But stand fellow-traveller to eternity, may I not also ask one thing of you? It is, that this year may be wholly devoted to the great purposes for which life is given; that you will stand no longer as the barren fig-tree, a mere cumberer of the ground; that you will this day resolve before your Maker, that, by his grace, the year 1846 shall be the last wasted, unprofitable, ungrateful, irreligious year of your lives-the last year on which you will close your eyes on truth, and live without the hope of heaven; that by the grace of God, the sun shall no longer rise and set in his annual revolutions on you a thoughtless, impenitent, unpar doned sinner. It is that you will now form a purpose by his help to reach forward to the eternal crown; and that as the days of the advancing year roll rapidly on, each morning shall witness the consecration of yourself to your God, and that in the shades of each evening you will render him praise. So living, its months, and weeks, will pass away without regret-for they will be bearing you nearer to your eternal home. So living, if you see its close, you will arrive there with far different feelings from those with which you ended the last year. And so living, if you are to be arrested during this year, it would not disturb or alarm you much, if "a still small voice" should be borne to your ear this day amidst its joyous congratulations and its hopes, saying "this year thou shalt die."

"So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan that moves

To the pale realms of shade, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon; but sustained and soothed
By unfaltering trust in Christ, approach thy grave
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams."

OCCASIONED BY THE DEATH OF REV. WILLIAM J. ARMSTRONG, D.D. DELIVERED IN PARK STREET CHURCH, DEC. 9, 1846.

[PUBLISHED BY REQUEST OF THE A. B. C. F. M.]

BY REV. NEHEMIAH ADAMS,

BOSTON, MASS.

Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.-PSALM cxvi., 15. THE journey begun by our friend and brother, in health and with pleasant anticipations, has been completed on the bier. The funeral rites have been performed in another city. He has lain down, "till the heavens be no more." His companions in death are distributed to their last resting-places. The storm is hushed. The fragments of the wreck are disappearing. I was prepared to say, the wind and waves no longer toll the bell which for several days was lifted above the waters on a portion of the wreck; but I learn this evening that the bell, though sunk beneath the surface, is now and then urged up by the swell of the sea, and thus imitating, as it were, the expiring efforts of the dying, tolls with a convulsive stroke. The full moon has many times walked in brightness over the scene of desolation, where the equal pulses of the sea now seem to deny the well-known agony and ruin.

All the incidents of the disaster have been spread far and wide, and have produced their impression upon the public mind, which is soon to be occupied with other events of various importance, while this will take its place among the historical facts which are repeated with an interest lessening from day to day with the lapse of time. To many, here and elsewhere, however, it will never lose its interest while life remains; the impressions made by it will be identified with their inmost thoughts and feelings; and in their characters and conduct its sacred influence will be felt to their dying day.

We come together at a time far enough removed from the event to admit of calm contemplation and reflection, and not far enough for any of us to have lost the vivid impressions at first made by it.

We all feel the need of soothing and consolatory thoughts, and the natural desire to know the facts in the case has been fully satisfied. The official relation of our friend and brother to the Missionary House in this city gives a propriety to this public memorial of him, which our private love for him, and our disposition to do him honor, are happy to acknowledge and improve. The spirits of just men made perfect need no earthly honor to secure for them any happiness or reward; yet it cannot be a matter of indifference to a good man in heaven to know that surviving com

panions and fellow servants appreciate his character and his services, and that "devout men carry him to his burial and make great lamentation over him."

A common ruin buried this servant of Christ, and forty or fifty others, in instant death. He was distinguished among them by his ministerial office, by his pious endeavors to instruct them in the time of peril, and by his most fervent and affecting supplications, and by the impressiveness of his demeanor during the whole trying scene. But the God whom he served, and whom he delighted to honor, did not interpose to distinguish him from his companions by any apparent alleviation in his sufferings or in the manner of his death. A portion of the deck fell upon him and upon many others with him. Who could have told at that moment by any sign which the accident conveyed, which of them feared God,-if any of them did not? "This is one thing, therefore I said it, He destroyeth the perfect and the wicked." In calamities, the impression would be made upon the mind, were it not for faith, that God disregards his servants when he mingles them in a promiscuous overthrow. He suffers the sea to destroy them, or the falling weight to crush them, or the cannibal savage to devour them, and does not come forth to arrest any law of nature, or do any special favor in their behalf. If we sometimes see good men rescued by a special interposition of Providence, we see the same in the case of wicked men; and if we see wicked men arrested by death on their way to their families, we see the same in the experience of eminently good men. No one has ever lost a friend by a sudden calamity, especially a friend who was known and loved as a good man, without having his feelings and his faith somewhat tried by the seeming disregard of Providence in the circumstances attending the loss of life. There is a natural expectation that God will shield the person of an eminently good man from indignity; that there will be some special mark of regard in the manner in which, if his life must be destroyed, he will receive the fatal stroke. We invest the laws of nature with something of our own feelings of reverence for the persons of those whom we respect and love. We almost expect to see, in the providence of God, the same regard for them.

There are times, indeed, when the manner of a good man's death has something of beauty, or sublimity, or of peculiar fitness, no less noticeable than the well known coincidence in the death of two Presidents of the United States upon the anniversary of our national independence. While it is the general law of Providence that one event happens to the righteous and to the wicked, the sovereignty of God makes exceptions to it, in certain cases, in favor of good men. We are not to expect them so as to feel disappointed when they do not occur; nor, when a good man dies, like John the Baptist, with no sign of special regard for him or the manner of his death, are we to conclude that he is

less an object of divine favor than another. We bow with reverence and awe before that appointment of divine Providence by which the laws of nature fulfill their commission without respect of persons, teaching us impressively the truth revealed in Scripture, that life is a scene of trial and of reward; that we are not to expect the divine testimony in our behalf by any remarkable providence; but in the exercise of faith, our hope reaching to that which is within the veil, we must meekly bow to the common lot of man in the outward circumstances of providential events, though by them we may make our grave with the wicked, and be numbered with the transgressors."

The inference, however, which might be drawn from such an undistinguished end, is contradicted by the Word of God. The seeming neglect of good men at such times, and the apparent want of regard for them in some of the events of Providence has no foundation in fact. At all times, under all circumstances, and when there is the least apparent interposition of heaven in their behalf," Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints."

Though hunger, and cold, and fear, and sad thoughts about the family circle, and the painfulness of spending a festival day* amid the perils of a wreck, the violent winds and waves, and finally the falling deck, and the engulphing waters, indicated no regard to the man of God more than to any other, yet his death was an event of interest and importance in the sight of the Most High.

The text asserts this general truth: THE DEATH OF GOOD MFN,

UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, IS DEEPLY INTERESTING IN THE SIGHT of God.

Among the multitude of deaths, their death, like a valuable thing in a promiscuous heap, is precious to Him. It is not forgotten nor disregarded as an ordinary event; it is invested with peculiar interest in the sight of God. A few considerations will illustrate this truth.

1. The death of a good man is a great and important event in the history of his redemption.

God chose him in Christ before the world was. He called him by his special grace into his kingdom; he applied to him the benefits of the Savior's death; he sealed him by the Holy Spirit; he has made all things thus far work together for good. That saint is to be among the fruits of the Savior's sufferings and death; his salvation is a necessary part of the great work of redemption. When probation with him is about to end, can it be a less interesting event to the Most High, than the event of his conversion on which God bestowed that "mighty power" which the Apostle compares to that "which he wrought in Christ, when he raised him from the dead, and set him at his own right hand in heavenly places?" The husbandman who planted the tree, and dressed it, and watched it, comes for the fruit; although the fruit be gathered

* The day of the Annual Thanksgiving in New York and sixteen other States.

by shaking the tree, he is not angry with the tree, nor neglectful of the fruit which he causes to fall.

2. The death of a good man is precious in the sight of God, because the life of such a man is intimately connected with the interests of the kingdom of God in this world.

To every servant God has committed a trust; from every servant who deserves the name, the cause of God in this world receives advantage. Some are put in trust with children to educate for future usefulness. Others are placed in a circle of relatives and friends for an example and a reproof, and as silent witnesses for God. They keep the consciences of others awake; they serve as a standard by which others judge of propriety and impropriety in their own conduct. Others are placed in situations where it seems as though they could do nothing but pray; their prayers, however, are essential to the purposes of God.

Others occupy places of more obvious influence and importance; but to every real servant of God in this world, there is committed some trust. He may be only like a single stone in the wall; its presence is not remarked upon, but its absence would be; and its removal, therefore, becomes an important event. He who orders everything in this world as Head over all things to the church does not suffer his faithful servants to die by chance; their removal is an event of too much importance to be left without special care and appointment; it is to be considered in each case whether this good example may safely be removed, or that restraining influence over others cease, or those prayers be suspended; whether the interests of large bodies of men, and the general affairs of the Redeemer's kingdom, will permit the removal of one servant of God and another, at particular times. Christ "has the keys of death."

"A Christian cannot die before his time,

The Lord's appointment is the servant's hour."

3. The immediate effect of the affliction upon survivors, cannot but render the death of a good man precious in the sight of God.

I see the tents of Israel in affliction. The bell which survived on the wreck, tolling the knell of the dead, seems as though it had received a special commission to utter the feelings of the whole church of God in this land. God never does anything, however dark and trying, which diminishes the confidence and love of his true children. The man who should wantonly do a deed that would plunge the whole people of God into sorrow, it would have been better for him if he had never been born. A paper dropped at the door by the carrier, containing an account of the "wreck of the Atlantic," gives the first intimation to his household respecting the possible fate of the husband and father. With every support which God affords the mind at such a moment, there is of course a degree of anguish which He, who "does not willingly afflict nor grieve the children of men," would not permit without special consideration, and for wise and benevolent purposes.