THE DEAD WHO DIE NO MORE: A FUNERAL SERMON, Delivered in ST. MARY'S CHURCH, BURLINGTON, K. J. On Sunday, August 4, 1833, BY THE RIGHT REV. GEORGE W. DOANE, D. D Bishop of the Diocese of New-Jersey. SERMON. NEITHER CAN THEY DIE ANY MORE. St. Luke, xx. 36. ST. PAUL, writing to Timothy, declares that Jesus Christ our Saviour "hath abolished death, and hath brought life and immortality to light, through the Gospel."* By his abolishing death, or rather depriving it of its tyrannic power, we are to understand that victory achieved by him upon the Cross, by which he procured for all who believe in him a resurrection to eternal life, an achievement celebrated by the same Apostle, in that noble passage in his first Epistle to the Corinthians: "The sting of death is sin; and the strength of sin is the law but thanks be to God, who giveth us the victory, through our Lord Jesus Christ!" By his bringing life and immortality to light, through the Gospel, we are not to understand its first intimation to mankind, but its clear and full revelation,-its being made luminous, as it were, in the lessons of his life, but broadest and brightest, even as with a blaze of glory, in his own mighty resurrection,-" Now is Christ risen * 2 Timothy i. 10. +1 Corinthians xv. 56, 57. from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept; for, since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."* But though it would by no means be correct to say, what the passage of St. Paul, properly understood, does not say, that Jesus Christ, in the Gospel, "brought life and immortality," (by which is meant immortal life,) "to light," in the sense commonly conveyed by this phrase, of first disclosure or suggestion; it would be a far greater error to suppose, that before the revelation of the Gospel, or independently of it, the world had any thing like clear and certain light upon the subject. In the desires and longings of the soul, unsatisfied by all that the brief span of its terrestrial being can be made to comprehend, the wiser of the ancient Heathen saw, or thought they saw, an intimation, scarcely stronger than a faint suspicion, of another life. From their experience of the utter inconsistency of the arrangements of this present world, even with what men call justice, they reasoned, feebly, for the most part, and inconclusively, and without the least shadow of effect upon their practice, to the probable retributions of another. And in the analogies of nature, the morning's daily beauties, the annual resurrection of the spring, and the strange transformations of some species of the insect race, they caught, with pardonable eagerness, at what seemed to 1 Corinthians xv. 20-22. |