Terrible as the evil is, if it must, and that at no distant day, be met, spare not to present it to your imagination; not to lacerate your feelings but to arm your resolution; not to excite unprofitable distress, but to strengthen your faith. If it terrify you at first, draw a little nearer to it every time. Familiarity will abate the terror. If you cannot face the image, how will you encounter the reality?

Let us then figure to ourselves the moment (who can say that moment may not be the next?) when all we cling to shall elude our grasp; when every earthly good shall be to us as if it had never been, except in the remembrance of the use we have made of it; when our eyes shall close upon a world of sense, and open on a world of spirits; when there shall be no relief for the fainting body, and no refuge for the parting soul, except that single refuge to which, perhaps, we have never thought of resorting that refuge which if we have not despised we have too probably neglected-the everlasting mercies of God in Christ Jesus.

Reader! whoever you are, who have neglected to remember that to die is the end for which you were born, know that you have a personal interest in this scene. Turn not away from it in disdain, however feebly it may have been represented. You may escape any other

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evil of life, but its end you cannot escape. Defer not then its weightiest concern to its weakest period. Begin not the preparation when you should be completing the work. Delay not the business which demands your best fac ulties to the period of their debility, probably of their extinction. Leave not the work which requires an age to do, to be done in a moment, a moment too which may not be granted. The alternative is tremendous. The difference is that of being saved or lost. It is no light thing to perish.

CHAP. XIX.

HAPPY DEATHS.

Few circumstances contribute more fatally to confirm in worldly men that insensibility to eternal things which was considered in the preceding Chapter, than the boastful accounts we sometimes hear of the firm and heroic death-beds of popular but irreligious characters. Many causes contribute to these happy deaths as they are called. The blind are bold, they do not see the precipice they despise.-Or perhaps there is less unwillingness to quit a world which has so often disappointed them, or which they have sucked to the last dregs. They leave life with less reluctance, feeling that they have exhausted all its gratifications. Or it is a disbelief of the reality of the state on which they are about to enter.-Or it is a desire to be released from excessive pain, a desire naturally felt by those who calculate their gain, rather

0*

by what they are escaping from, than by what they are to receive, Or it is equability of temper, or firmness of nerve, or hardness of mind. -Or it is the arrogant wish to make the last act of life confirm its preceding professions.Or it is the vanity of perpetuating their philo. sophic character. Or if some faint ray of light break in, it is the pride of not retracting the sentiments which from pride they have maintained the desire of posthumous renown among their own party; the hope to make their disciples stand firm by their example; the ambition to give their last possible blow to revelation or perhaps the fear of expressing doubts which might beget a suspicion that their disbelief was not so sturdy as they would have it thought. Above all, may they not, as a punishment for their long neglect of the warning voice of truth, be given up to a strong de, lusion to believe the lie they have so often propagated, and really to expect to find in death that eternal sleep with which they have affected to quiet their own consciences, and have really weakened the faith of others.

Every new instance is an additional buttress on which the sceptical school lean for support, and which they produce as a fresh triumph. With equal satisfaction they collect stories of infirmity, depression and want of courage in the dying hour of religious men, whom the nature

of the disease, timorousness of spirit, profound humility, the sad remembrance of sin, though long repented of, and forgiven, a deep sense of the awfulness of meeting God in judgment ;whom some or all of these causes may occasion to depart in trembling fear; in whom, though heaviness may endure through the night of death, yet joy cometh in the morning of the resurrection.

It is a maxim of the Civil Law that definitions are hazardous. And it cannot be denied that various descriptions of persons have hazarded much in their definitions of a happy death. A very able and justly admired writer, who has distinguished himself by the most valuable works on political economy, has recorded, as proofs of the happy death of a no less celebrated contemporary, that he cheerfully amused himself in his last hours with LUCIAN, A GAME of WHIST, and some good humoured drollery upon CHARON and his boat.

But may we not venture to say, with "one of the People called Christians,"* himself a Wit and Philosopher, though of the School of Christ, that the man who could meet death in such a frame of mind "might smile over Babylon in ruins, esteem the Earthquake which destroyed

* The late excellent Bishop Horne. See his Letters to Dr. Adam Smith.