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; Lincoln's Inn, May 5, 1822; and 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 clamourous 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 judgement 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 terrours 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 judgementseat, yet would a restless conscience seldom fail to whisper to 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

neither the heathen nor the generality of the Jews had any sufficient ground to hope that their imperfect obedience would be accepted by God, and introduce them to Elysium or Paradise.

I say they had no sufficient grounds for hope, though I am far from forgetting the expiatory offerings for sin which their law commanded, or the connexion and correspondence which their Divine Lawgiver designed between those offerings of vicarious blood and the Christian truth of the one great atonement. But as the obvious weakness and inefficiency of such sacrifices were sufficient to deter the most sanguine from relying with perfect confidence on the outward ceremony alone, so the event of which that ceremony was the type, and on whose retrospective blessedness its inward grace depended, as being future, was obscure even to the wisest and most enlightened Israelite, and could, therefore, afford no present definite consolation even to those who were, in the fulness of time, to be saved by it.

Nor need we wonder, therefore, at that custom (so strongly expressive of diffidence in themselves and their own exertions) which began at a very early period of the synagogue, of pleading the merits and relying on the intercession of their more favoured or less criminal ancestors; nor that, before this practice arose among them, and in spite of whatever fallacious comfort they might derive from it, the death even of holy men was, under the old dispensation, regarded as a misfortune rather