1

security in one part of the species and despair in another. The first would have been in the highest degree dangerous to the character; the second insupportable to the spirits. The same observation we are entitled to repeat concerning the two cases of sudden death, and of death brought on by long disease. If sudden deaths never occurred, those who found themselves free from disease would be in perfect safety; they would regard themselves as out of the reach of danger. With all apprehensions they would lose all seriousness and all restraint: and those persons who the most want to be checked, and to be awakened to a sense of the consequences of virtue and vice, the strong, the healthy, and the active, would be without the greatest of all checks, that which arises from the constant liability of being called to judgment. If there were no sudden deaths, the most awful warning which mortals can receive would be lost: that consideration which carries the mind the most forcibly to religion, which convinces us that it is indeed our proper concern, namely, the precariousness of our present condition, would be done away. On the other hand, if sudden deaths were too frequent, human life might become too perilous: there would not be stability and dependence either upon our own lives, or the lives of those with whom we were connected, sufficient to carry on the regular offices of human society. In this respect therefore we see much wisdom. Supposing death to be appointed as the mode (and some mode there must be) of passing from one state of existence to another, the manner in which it is made to happen conduces to the purposes of warning and admonition, without overthrowing the conduct of human affairs.

Of sickness, the moral and religious use will be acknowledged, and in fact is acknowledged, by all who have experienced it: and they who have not experienced it, own it to be a fit state for the meditations, the offices of religion. The fault I fear is, that we refer ourselves too much to that state. We think of these things too little in health, because we shall necessarily have to think of them when we come to die. This is a great fault: but then it confesses, what is undoubtedly true, that the sick-bed and the death-bed shall inevitably force these reflections upon us. In that it is right, though it be wrong in waiting till the season of actual virtue and actual reformation be past, and when consequently the sick-bed and the deathbed can bring nothing but uncertainty, horror, and despair. But my present subject leads me to consider sickness, not so much as a preparation for death, as the trial of our virtue of virtues the most severe, the most arduous, perhaps the best pleasing to Almighty God: namely, trust and confidence in him, under circumstances of discouragement and perplexity. To lift up the feeble hands and the languid eye; to draw and turn with holy hope to our Creator, when every comfort forsakes us, and every help fails: to feel and find in him, in his mercies, his promises, in the works of his providence, and still more in his word, and in the revelation of his designs by Jesus Christ, such rest and consolation to the soul, as to stifle our complaints and pacify our murmurs; to beget in our hearts tranquillity and confidence, in the place of terror and consternation, and this with simplicity and sincerity, without having, or wishing to have, one human witness to observe or know it, is such a test and trial of faith and hope, of patience and devotion, as

cannot fail of being in a very high degree well pleasing to the author of our natures, the guardian, the inspector, and the rewarder of our virtues. It is true in this instance, as it is true in all, that whatever tries our virtue strengthens and improves it. Virtue comes out of the fire purer and brighter than it went into it. Many virtues are not only proved but produced by trials: they have properly no existence without them. "We glory," saith St. Paul, "in tribulation also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience, and patience experience, and experience hope."

But of sickness we may likewise remark, how wonderfully it reconciles us to the thoughts, the expectation, and the approach of death, and how this becomes, in the hand of Providence, an example of one evil being made to correct another. Without question the difference is wide between the sensations of a person who is condemned to die by violence, and of one who is brought gradually to his end by the progress of disease; and this difference sickness produces. To the Christian, whose mind is not harrowed up by the memory of unrepented guilt, the calm and gentle approach of his dissolution has nothing in it terrible. In that sacred custody, in which they that sleep in Christ will be preserved, he sees a rest from pain and weariness, from trouble and distress: gradually withdrawn from the cares and interests of the world; more and more weaned from the pleasures of the body, and feeling the weight and press of its infirmities, he may be brought almost to desire with St. Paul to be no longer absent from Christ; knowing, as he did, and as he assures us, that, "if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."

XXXIV.

THE KNOWLEDGE OF ONE ANOTHER IN A FUTURE

STATE.

COLOSSIANS, i. 29.

Whom we preach, warning every man, and teaching every man in all wisdom, that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus.

THESE words have a primary and a secondary use. In their first and most obvious view, they express the extreme earnestness and anxiety with which the apostle Paul sought the salvation of his converts. To bring men to Jesus Christ, and when brought to turn and save them from their sins, and to keep them steadfast unto the end in the faith and obedience to which they were called, was the whole work of the great apostle's ministry, the desire of his heart, and the labour of his life: it was that in which he spent all his time, and all his thoughts; for the sake of which he travelled from country to country, warning every man, as he speaks in the text, and exhorting every man, enduring every hardship and every injury, ready at all times to sacrifice his life, and at last actually sacrificing it in order to accomplish the great purpose of his mission, that he might at the last day "present his beloved converts perfect in Christ Jesus." This is the direct scope of the text. But it is not for this that I have made choice of it.

The last clause of the

verse contains within it, indirectly and by implication, a doctrine certainly of great personal importance, and

I trust also of great comfort, to every man who hears me. The clause is this, "that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus:" by which I understand St. Paul to express his hope and prayer, that at the general judgment of the world, he might present to Christ the fruits of his ministry, the converts whom he had made to his faith and religion, and might present them perfect in every good work. And if this be rightly interpreted, then it affords a manifest and necessary inference, that the saints in a future life will meet and be known again to one another; for how, without knowing again his converts in their new and glorious state, could St. Paul desire or expect to present them at the last day?

My brethren, this is a doctrine of real consequence. That we shall come again to a new life; that we shall by some method or other be made happy or be made miserable, in that new state, according to the deeds done in the body, according as we have acted and governed ourselves in this world, is a point affirmed absolutely and positively in all shapes, and under every variety of expression, in almost every page of the New Testament. It is the grand point inculcated from the beginning to the end of that book. But concerning the particular nature of the change we are to undergo, and in what is to consist the employment and happiness of those blessed spirits which are received into heaven, our information, even under the Gospel, is very limited. We own it is so. Even St. Paul, who had extraordinary communications, confessed that in these things we see through a glass darkly." But at the same time that we acknowledge that we know little, we ought to remember, that with