liest days of the law and the patriarchs, the doctrine of the Israelites was, in this respect, the same with our own, and that they acknowledged no less than the Christian Church, that death was but the beginning of another life, and that after death came judgment.

Still, however, there were some circumstances in their situation which prevented this truth from producing to its full extent that blessed effect on the minds of the house of Israel, which, after his conversion to Christianity, the apostle of the Gentiles experienced, and of which he speaks, in the words of the text, as of privileges not belonging to himself alone, but as the common heritage of all those who bear the name of Christian.

What those circumstances were, and in what manner the Gospel has delivered us from their might, I must reserve to a future sermon. But in the mean time it is my duty most earnestly to call on you to consider that the greater and more glorious the lights and the privileges of the Gospel the more intense the danger from which it sets us free, and the disquietude the more painful, the greater is our obligation, and the necessity the stronger to avail ourselves of the deliverance held out by God's own hand, and in our lives no less than with our lips to manifest our fervent gratitude. Simply to live for ever is a privilege of a very doubtful character; it is a privilege which the spiritual enemies of the Almighty have retained in their wildest defection from His rule, and it is a

privilege which the monarch of all may continue or decree in His wrath as well as in His mercy. But to be happily and gloriously immortal is a blessing which, if the Gospel be true, the Son of God has purchased for us by His blood; it is a blessing which His bounty has set within the reach of every one of us; by Him the tree of life has again been planted in the world, and it remains for each of us to determine whether its fruit is worth our gathering. But let us hasten to make our option, for the shades of evening are waxing long, and the hours of exertion are melting fast into twilight. To die is the lot of all men, but let us so live that to die may be our gain and our immortality!

SERMON XVII.

THE FEAR OF DEATH.

[Preached before the University of Oxford, May 3, 1818; at Lincoln's Inn, May 5, 1822; and at Madras, Feb. 26, 1826.]

PHIL. i. 21.

To die is gain.

In my late sermon on this text it was my endeavour to explain the causes which made, to the great majority of the heathen world, the expectation of death a source of almost unmingled disquietude and pain; and I shortly noticed, also, that the Jews, though trained under a holier law, and embued with a more excellent erudition; though taught from the lessons of their fathers, and the implied but sufficient testimony of their ancient and divine oracles, to crown the temples of their deceased friends with flowers in honour of the garden of Eden, and to bless, in their service for the dead, that God who kept their bones unbroken till the hour of resurrection; that the Jews, in spite of all the presumptions and traditions which they could plead for a life beyond the grave, were not enabled to derive from those traditions a hope so sure, so

certain, and so full of blessedness as that which St. Paul experienced, and which the humblest Christian, if he be not wanting to himself, may experience through Jesus Christ our Lord! And the inferiority of their hope to ours may appear from the following considerations.

It was, in the first place, less absolutely certain and undeniable. It was, indeed, the hereditary belief of their tribes since the time of those patriarchs who had fallen asleep in hope, and who, by the testimony which they bore to themselves that they were pilgrims in the present world, evinced that they expected to find a better and more enduring home hereafter. It was implied in very many striking passages of Scripture, as where Job declares his hope of seeing God after worms had destroyed his body, and where God Himself, the God of the living, laid claim to the faith and homage of those who had long since fallen asleep in the tomb of Macpelah.

But the revelation was implied, not explicit; the doctrine was disputed in its essential circumstances, by the majority of the nations around them, and it was denied circumstantially and altogether by a clamorous and powerful party among themselves. And when we compare, in practice and on subjects where the mind is little disposed to acquiesce in uncertainties, the effect produced on ourselves by a speculative and impugned theory in comparison with that fulness of faith which follows an authentic experiment, we may be well convinced that

the actual return of the Son of God from the grave has done more, by itself to prove the immortality of our nature, than all the law and all the prophets, and all the traditions of the fathers from Abraham down to Gamaliel, had effected for the confirmation of the house of Judah.

But this was by no means the only circumstance of disquietude. For, secondly, the faith of the orthodox Jew consisted, as we have seen, not only in the persuasion that his soul was immortal, and that his body should revive, but in the expectation of a most just judgment after death, in which the eternal condition of men was to be decided according to their works done in the body. But, though this hope would have been, indeed, a heavenly comfort under the terrors of the grave, could they have been sure that their own lives were such as God approves, and that, in the integrity of their hearts, they might pass boldly before His judgment seat, yet would a restless conscience seldom fail to whisper the dying man that his actions had been far other than well-pleasing to his Judge, and that the power, the justice, the purity of that Judge were to him nothing else than so many additional arguments of dismay and danger. The same God, he could not help remembering, who hath promised to "keep mercy for thousands" beyond their deserts, hath declared, on the other hand, that He will "by no means clear the guilty;"* and that