own rashness has incurred, He is near at hand, like the Apostle, to support and strengthen us. If we follow His directions, He gives us the means and assurance of safety, and His mighty intercession can rescue His miserable creatures from a gulph of destruction more dreadful than that deep which yawned beneath the Cretan mariners! To Him, therefore, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, be all obedience shown, and all praise and glory given, now and for ever! SERMON XVI. THE FEAR OF DEATH. [Preached before the University of Oxford, 1818; at Lincoln's Inn, 1822; and at Madras, 1826.] PHIL. i. 21. To die is gain. To cure mankind of the fear of death is what the wisest men of the ancient world have, according to the different degrees of their imperfect knowledge, in various ways attempted to accomplish. It is among the principal and most blessed effects which (according to the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,) were to follow from the humiliation of God's Son to our mortal nature 1; and how truly and perfectly it was produced in the case of St. Paul, is apparent from the text I have chosen. As, then, the value of the cure may be appreciated from the eagerness with which it has been sought, and its possibility demonstrated from the example of those who have attained it, it may be useful and interesting to enquire how much had been effected 1 Heb. ii. 15. towards this great end by unassisted reason or ancient tradition; what further aids the religion of Christ supplies; what men those are whom Christianity encourages to look forward with hope beyond the grave; in what manner that hope may best be kindled and kept alive in us, and in what manner it may be expressed most fitly. I have said that to subdue the fear of death was the favourite object of heathen wisdom, and the point to which the sages of the ancient world most earnestly directed their labours. There have been some, indeed, both in ancient and modern times, who, instead of suggesting considerations whereby death, before it came, might be contemplated with less of horrour, and, when it came, endured more easily, have been content to advise us to avoid the subject as much as possible, to shift the melancholy scene whenever it came in view, and to drive from our thoughts, by considerations of an opposite tendency, an event which, come when it may, is beyond our controul and remedy. But those persons have been greatly ignorant of the temper of the human mind and the constitution of things around them, who did not recollect with what a strange and mechanical impulse the soul reverts the most to those ideas from which she is most anxious to escape, or who did not perceive that all nature is too closely filled with hints of our mortality to suffer the melancholy truth to fade away from our remembrance. Should we admit the possibility of effacing from the mind by pleasure, or by business, the traces of what we are, and whither our journey leads us, yet the recollection is sure to return when this fever of the spirits has subsided, and to return with greater strength, and dressed in more dismal colours. We cannot study, we cannot feast, we cannot dance always; and the blithest and the busiest of us all will have enough of time in his hours of sickness or inactivity to mourn over the shortness of his earthly day, and to tremble at the darkness which is to follow. But this is not all. For, the idea of death having once possessed the soul, it is by no means so easily expelled as these miserable comforters imagine. It will sometimes follow us into the midst of the densest crowd, and mingle its hideous aspect with whatever pictures of ambition, or of indulgence, our most active fancy can assemble; it will make our cup bitter; it will strew our bed with thorns, and whisper to us in the midst of our mirth with a voice of most dismal moaning. "Linquenda tellus et domus et placens Ulla brevem dominum sequetur '! This truth is confessed by the tenour of those very counsels by which the votaries of vice and luxury have enticed us to acquiesce in such pleasures as they were able to supply, and to shut our eyes against 1 Hor. Od. II. xiv. 21. their approaching termination. Why else are we so repeatedly exhorted to "talk not of fate but to talk of odours and wine;" to " pry not into the Babylonian computations," to "recollect that the main evil of death lies in its apprehension?" Why is this very shortness of life so continually insisted on as an argument that we should "eat and drink while life remains to us," unless the mirth of the voluptuary is, indeed, mingled with heaviness, and is, perhaps, therefore chiefly valued by him as a contrast with the gloom which nature presents on every side, and which throws its shadow over every circumstance of his present pursuits pleasures? There is no need of the suspended sword of Damocles to scare him in his hours of merriment, while the roses which wither on his brow, and the cries of the mourners in the streets, and the familiar faces which pass away from around his table, all teach him that the hopes of earth are nothing else than vanity, and that "there is no counsel, nor device, nor wisdom in the grave whither he goeth." or Since, then, to lose the thought of death is impossible, it only remains to make that thought, by some means, less intolerable. And this has been attempted through many different suggestions, of which the greater part have only served to show the weakness and inconsistency of those by whom they were brought forward. Some have attempted to support us under this last visitation of our mortal nature by reminding us that it is, in our case, |