should send them home to the heart) make but a slight impression, and are almost wholly unheeded. The remembrance of them too, is to most men irksome; it damps the enjoyment of worldly pleasure, and quenches the ardour of worldly pursuit. Whenever, therefore, it intrudes itself, it is sedulously repelled: "The righteous perisheth and no man layeth it to heart; they are destroyed from evening until morning, and no one regardeth it."

That the thought of death, indeed, should so intimately and so constantly mix itself up with all our other thoughts, as to sadden our most innocent satisfactions, and to impede the common business and useful purposes of our calling, it is only enthusiasm that could require. But this surely can be no reason, why the remembrance of mortality, the consideration of our departing hour, should be always and altogether banished. There are pauses in employment, there are interruptions in recreation, there are holy seasons expressly set apart for it. Such

is the Sabbath such our natal day—or the close of the year—or a sacramental preparation and such, in its original meaning and institution, was the solemn season of Lent: a season, in respect to which, we have perhaps run too fast and too far, from Popery into indifference; and, having disengaged our minds from the shackles of ceremony, have rushed into the latitudes of licentiousness.

That, to us, this season may not be a mere name, that we may recall the practice of pristine Christianity, and distinguish the weeks by some serious actthat, not satisfied with the mere formalities of a diet-day, or the substitution of an oratorio for a dramatic entertainment, we may be led, by whatever exercise of external devotion we may adopt, to an inward and spiritual self-denial; let us direct our attention during the Sabbaths of the present Lent, to Death, the end of all men, and of all things with which men busy themselves: and afterwards to those awful matters by which it is succeeded

to the grave; to an intermediate state; to judgment; to hell; and to heaven.

In this first discourse of the series, I shall take into consideration,

1st. The origin and nature of Death. 2d. What changes take place at the time of Death,

3d. What may be expected as the consequences of Death: and,

4th. What circumstances may serve to mitigate the terrors, or to counteract the evils of Death.

1. We are first to consider the origin and nature of Death.

Death, we are informed in Scripture, is the punishment of the fall of Adam. “In the day, whereon thou eatest the forbidden fruit, thou diest," said God to the first man, on placing him in paradise. That man disobeyed: he tasted: he deteriorated his nature:-he died :-that is to say, at that moment he became mortal.

By one man's disobedience sin entered into the world, and death by sin. Now the universality of death is a plain and

necessary consequence, resulting from the fall of Adam. For since all are children of Adam, all inherit from that first parent the elements of depravity, and therefore the seeds of death. All, the unconscious infant, as well as the wayward adult, may strictly be said to have sinned, because all derive from their progenitor, the rudiments of sin. Hence, then, the death of all: for "Death is the wages of sin"; "and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." Thus, in Adam, all die: for not only did all the generations, and all the myriads of the human race, exist in the loins, and follow the physical structure of Adam;-but all partake, by birth-right, of his debased, of his sinful, and, consequently, of his mortal

nature.

2. Such being the origin and nature of Death, let us next ask, What changes take place at the time of Death?

Death is a closing of the eyes to the cheerful light of day-an insensibility to all that is doing under the sun. It is to

depart for ever from this beautiful world; to leave our neighbourhood and its courtesies; our home and its comforts; to be welcomed no more by the caresses of our children; to become unconscious and deaf to the voice of friendship; and to exchange all the schemes of ambition, all the satisfactions of possession, and all the comforts of our lot, for the coldness, the darkness, the solemn stillness of the tomb. We see that at death, the eyes are sealed, the lungs forget their office, the pulses cease to beat:-the blood no longer courses within the veins; the silver cord of the tongue is loosed; the limbs, the supporters of the house, fall prostrate like broken columns, and the powerless right hand forgets its cunning. Every thing seems to bespeak a cessation, an extinction of being; and hence, with the sole exception of some unhappy suicides, driven to desperation, or afflicted with insanity, all men instinctively cling to life; and even when looking for immortality with the faith which borders on as