SERMON I HEBREWS ix. 27. It is appointed unto all men once to die; but after this the judgment. THE doom pronounced upon man for his first act of disobedience, included all kinds of death. The sentence may be considered as running thus: Thou shalt die in body; thou shalt die as to all holiness in character; and thou shalt die by a just and eternal condemnation. Now, since the apostle is here making a comparison of the once offering of Christ," and his coming to glorify his saints, with the death and judgment procured by the sin of man, it is very possible that death, in its widest sense, is intended in our text. Natural death, however, and the judgment which follows, are not only the direct con-" sequences of this early denunciation, but do, in some sense, comprise the whole of its meaning, as now explained. We may, therefore, without unfaithfulness to the text, confine ourselves, at present, to the two points of declaration here contained. I. That all men do certainly die: and We do not, As a mat but is not I. THE CERTAINTY OF DEATH. indeed, need convincing of this. ter of fact, it is admitted at once; this one among the many cases where we have reason to think that men assent to a proposition, without truly believing it? Have living men any of that persuasive trust in regard to this truth, which is essential in all cases to real faith? It is believed not; and we think there is the more need of frequent, ly and forcibly urging this truth, from the consideration that men do not love to think of death, and for the most part, do not, unless it is obtruded upon them. Let us attempt to aid our weak convictions on this subject, therefore-not by formal demonstrations of the certainty of death, but by solemn representation, bringing it as near as possible. Look around you, then, and behold the symptoms and analogies of death. Every object, with which we have hitherto become acquainted, has more or less of these appearances attached to it. Every thing in the vegetable world dies yearly: the grass blossoms, and is cut down by the mower's scythe our crops share the same destiny: and even the stately trees of the forest cast their annual verdure, and their lofty trunks are marred by violence, or wasting away with some gradual consumption. You behold the mineral kingdom exhibiting the same appearance; ores and mines are gradually yielding to the consumptions of man: animals are subject to disease, and destroy one another : mountains are running down into the vallies the rivers of antiquity are already dried up; and the very planetary system, by a few centuries of observation, is found to be drawing nearer together, and indicates a time when the grand machine must be wound up. The works of art are still more unable to resist the progress of decay. A man may write a splendid history of a splendid event, but millions of such volumes are already extinct and forgotten; he may build a tomb as large as the pyramids over his ashes-but 'tombs are mortal:' the all destroying hand of time scatters the sculptured marble on the wind. : From all these analogies, then, we might expect that man was mortal, had no decree announced it he might live a little longer, perhaps, and being among the higher order of God's works, it would perhaps be expected that he should; but die he must. Every analogy, every symptom in other works, would tell him that sooner or later he must go down, with the rest of created objects, to the dust! Behold, 2. The varied instrumentality of death-the means which surround us for effecting this event. It takes but little to destroy human life; and yet the world is full of instruments for effecting this destruction. The soul and body are united by a thread, which the smallest incident might sever; and yet there seem to stand around us giants, with battle axes, as if impatient of a possibility that we should escape. Millions of poisonous insects fly in the air, and crawl in the valley: suffocating vapours exhale from woods, and rivers, and swamps: the slightest variation in the proportions of the gasses of which our atmosphere is composed, would instantly destroy us our bodies are exposed to about eleven hundred specifick diseases -any one of which might be fatal: accidents. by drowning-by fire-by the stroke of ani mals-the falling of timber-and innumerable other casualties, continually beset us. Lightnings shoot their fiery arrows from the clouds-earthquakes rock our habitations into dust-and war, and treason, hurl men in millions against the bosoms of their fellow men, to effect this emulous work of destruction. Surrounded with such an instrumentality, how can we escape? In sight of innumerable foes of life, in every stage and attitude of our existence, who does not know that he must die? These seem to me, to place us in an open field of continual exposure they strip our bosoms bare of defence, and stand around us, brandishing their naked weapons at the mark. But observe again, that the work of death is actually going on it is not from analogy-not from exposure, that we are left to infer our mortality-we see the actual process. Oh yes, and from the day in which the earth drank the blood of the first martyr, slain by a brother's hand, there has not been a moment's interval! From long before the days of the flood, or so soon as the earth had become as populous as it now is, there has been going into the eternal world, some trembling newly dismissed spirit, at the full rate of one for every second of time. The |