ity-something suited to such senses and such powers of enjoyment as death will extinguish-something that he will perhaps hand down to posterity, but which a few happy years will wrest away from himself, and that by an act of everlasting be

reavement.

We cannot move amongst our fellows whether in meetings or in market places, or even on those convivial occasions when man is so willing to drown all his graver anxieties in the playfulness of the passing hour, without most plainly perceiving that the present is not enough for him-that he is constantly going forth in anticipation of some distant future which he has not realized that instead of the quiescence of one who has found the promised end, he has the forecast, and restlessness, and doubt of one who is still agog and seeking. There is not an individual we know, who is not thus bounding onward, and that with the certain strenuousness of his whole heart, to some object which lies, or seems to lie in the vast horizon before him. But when we come to inquire how far on the line of his history it may be placed, we find, in the overwhelming majority of instances, that it belongs to the region of sense, and almost never to the region of spirituality-that the main efforts of human ambition are lavished on some brief and splendid evanescence, which cannot last to any single possessor beyond his own puny generation. Now that all are seeking there can be no doubt; but where is the discernible symptom of almost any seeking beyond the confines of that territory which God hath spread under our feet, first for the sustenance, and then, for the sepulchre of human bodies? Where is the man who is prosecuting with the assiduity of business, his personal interest in that country where dwell the spirits of just men made perfect? This tendency towards the distant unseen, stood out most plainly and most clearly in the history of the believing patriarchs, of whom we read in the eleventh chapter of the Hebrews; but now the tendency of almost every man we see is plainly the opposite of this; so that travelling the round of human experience it may nearly be affirmed without alleviation. of all, that they are a horde of hard driving creatures, in full pursuit of something that lies in the distance before them, which they can only hold in frail and fleeting tenantry while they abide in this world, and which death-remorseful and insatiable death-will soon ravish from their grasp.

Now to behold in man such a fondness for futurity enhances the paradox. Were man satisfied with present things, this might explain his startling insensibility to the futurities of the unseen world; but when we find that palpably he is greatly

more engrossed with things future, than with things present, we say, it enhances the paradox we are now speaking of. To behold in man such a fondness for futurity, and, at the same time, such a perverseness in all his computations of futurityto see him so disdainful of the past, and so dissatisfied with the present, and yet still laboring for the future, and fixing his regards on that only futurity which must soon be present, and soon be irrevocably past-to see him so boundless in his desires, and yet so averse to the alone field of enterprize where he can find scope for them, and so unwilling to exchange the objects of time for those of a boundless eternity-to perceive him so obstinately and so peremptorily blind in this matter, and that not merely in the face of the most obviously admitted dangers, but in the face of the most urgent and affecting mementos with which sad history is ever strewing his path in this worldsurely it is one of the strangest mysteries of our nature, and, at the same time, one of the strongest tokens of its strangeness, that man should thus embark all his desires in a frail and crazy vessel, so soon to be engulphed by that sweeping whirlwind which, sooner or later, will overtake the whole of our existing generation that on the quicksands of time he should rear his only resting place, and even please himself with the delusion of its firm and secure establishment, though he knows, and most assuredly knows, that a few little years will witness its total and irremediable overthrow.

Now to explore a little further this mystery of our constitution. Let me observe, that to alleviate this gross infatuation, it may be said, and has been said with plausibility too, that the region of sense and the region of spirituality are so unlike the one to the other, that there is positively nothing in the experience of the former that can at all make out a claim to the conceptions of the latter; and then, again, as if to intercept the flight of our imagination forwards to eternity, there is a dark and cloudy envelopement that hangs on the very entrance to it. Ere we can realize that distant world of souls, we must pierce our way beyond the curtain of the grave-we must scale the awful barricado which separates the visible from the invisible-we must make our escape from all the close, and warm, and besetting agencies which, in this land of human bodies, are ever plying us with constant and powerful solicitations, and force our way beyond the boundaries of sense, to that mysterious place where cold, and meagre, and evanescent spectres dwell.

We know not that there is another tribe of beings in the universe who have such a task to perform. Angels have no

VOL. I.

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death to undergo; there is no such fear of unnatural violence between them and their final destiny. It is for man, and for aught that appears it is for man alone, to watch, from the other side of the material panorama that surrounds him, the great and the amazing realities with which he has everlastingly to do-it is for him, so locked in an imprisonment of clay, and with no other loopholes of communication between himself and all that surrounds him than the eye and the ear-it is for him to light up in his bosom a lively and a realizing sense of the things that eye hath never seen, and ear hath never heard. It is for man, and perhaps for man alone, to travel in thought over the ruins of a mighty desolation, and beyond the wreck of that present world by which he is encompassed, to conceive that future world on which he is to expatiate for ever. But a harder achievement, perhaps, than any,-it is for a man, in the exercise of faith, to observe that most appalling of all contemplations, the decay and the dissolution of himself; to think of the time when his now animated frame-work, every part of which is so sensitive and dear to him, shall fall to pieces-when the vital warmth by which at present it is so thoroughly pervaded shall take its departure, and leave to coldness and abandonment all that is visible of this moving, and acting, and thinking creature-when those limbs, with which he now steps so firmly, and that countenance out of which he now looks so gracefully, and that tongue with which he now speaks so eloquently; when that whole body for the interest and provision of which he now labors so strenuously, as if indeed it were immortal--when all these shall be reduced to one mass of putrefaction, and at length crumble, with the coffin that encloses them, into dust! Why, my brethren, to a being in the full consciousness and possession of its living energies, there is something, if I may be allowed the expression, so foreign and so unnatural in death, that we ought not to wonder if it scare away the mind from that ethereal region of existence to which it is hastening. Angels have no such transition of horror and mystery to undergo. There is no screen of darkness like this interposed between them and the portion of their futurity, however distant; and it appears that it is for man only to drive a bridge across that barrier which looks so impenetrable, or so to surmount the power of vision as to carry his aspirings over the summits of all that revelation has made known to him.

"This is at best but an approximation to the solution of the mystery. I am not sure that a full satisfactory solution is at all practicable; but however uncontrollable the task may be, satisfactorily to explain the reason of this strange infatuation,

let us never cease from our efforts, when there is even but a slight and shadowy chance of success, practically to overcome it; and for this reason it is right to sound the alarm that has so oft been sounded before without success-it is our duty to reiterate the attack on the heretofore unmoved listlessness and lethargy of the human spirit. It is true that a moment of tragic sensibility may be all the effect of an argument drawn from the rapid flight of those days which have passed over our heads, and the wide and wasting ravages that death has made on our familiar society; nevertheless, it is right again to aver, that your days will soon be summed up, and that your death bed with all its agonies, its fears, and its heart rending separations will soon be realized. We know that it is not the mov- ing eloquence of the preacher which will dislodge this infatuation, and that it needs a strength mightier than that of human argument to make a breach on the carnality in which man hath so firmly entrenched him.

"All his views of futurity are puny; time appears to him as large as eternity; and eternity, in shrunk and shadowy remoteness, appears to his vision in all the littleness and insignificance of time. This is the true secret of the peace; it is a spiritual blindness; it is the peace of one who looks only at earthly things through the loopholes of an earthly tabernacle; and if he continue unblessed by an illumination from heaven, it will not be till this tabernacle be taken down-not till the soul hath escaped through the rending of that framework which now so confines and darkens it-not till it hath broken loose from the prison-house of this mortal element shall the spirit that is in all flesh be dissipated, and the wretched child of this world be, at length, awakened from his bed of then irrecoverable delusion.

"Let me, however, before quitting this part of the subject, assure the children of men of this obstinate delusion, who are now expending their energies on the pursuits and the politics, and the busy schemes of a world which is fast passing away— let me warn them of the truth which one and all of them will soon find to be fearfully realized. They are rearing their chief good on a foundation that is perishable-they are laboring for one portion only which will speedily be arrested from them by the grasp of the destroyer, who will leave them without a portion and without an inheritance for ever. They are laboring for a part of this world's substance, and in the possession of it, verily, they have their reward; but with regard to the substance which endureth, as for that, they have never labored, so that they never will acquire. They have sought to be arrayed

in perishable glory, and perhaps will find a little hour of magnificence on earth, ere they take their everlasting adieu to its infatuations; but that hour will soon come to its termination, and death may leave all the possessions untouched, but he will lay his rude and his resistless hand on the possessor. The house may stand in castellated pride for many generations, and the domain may smile for many ages in undiminished beauty; but in less perhaps than half a generation death will shoot his unbidden way to the inner apartment, and without spoiling the lord of his property, he will spoil the property of its lord. It is not his way to tear the parchment and the rights of investiture from the hands of the proprietor; but to paralyze and so unlock the hands, and then they fall like useless and forgotten things away from him. It is thus that death smiles in ghastly contempt on all human aggrandizement; he meddles not with the things that are occupied, but he lays hold of the occupier; he does not seize on the wealth, but he lays his arrest on the owner; and he forces away his body to the grave, where it crumbles into dust, and in turning the soul out of its warm and well favored tenement, he turns it adrift on the cheerless waste of a desolate and neglected eternity.

I have dwelt the longer on this topic in that I believe the peace of nature to be no more than insensibility. I consider it a very great mistake to say that au the peace that is in the world is from true or false theology; because men may receive a sound theology, and yet the whole character and constitution of them be overcharged with that listlessness, that apathy, or to use a scriptural phrase, that carnality of which I have now been speaking. It is on this account that I advert a moment to this topic, that I believe the peace of nature to be no more than insensibility. I say, man hears of God and eternity without dismay, not so much from the inspiration of a fallacious. hope, as from the absence alike of both hope and terror from his heart-not because he looks at the bright side of things spiritually, but because looking neither to the one side nor the other of these, he is wholly engrossed with things carnal. Hist is altogether a negative tranquillity, founded more on the sluggishness of his mental constitution, than on any misjudgment of the intellect that is actively engaged on the contemplation of the unseen world. It is the unconcern of a man who is blind, or a man who is asleep, and who needs not so much to be reasoned into a correct view of the subject, as to be so roused that he may open his eyes to take an intent or earnest view of the subject at all.