find the refreshment which those sorrows purchased for him!

Neither is death now to be regarded as a destroying of the works of God; because the future Regeneration of the body is ascertained by the fact of our Redeemer's Resurrection. He who was the first-born from the dead, an heir of life in his own right, hath secured the same right of inheritance to all the partakers of that nature in which, and with which, he entered upon his glory.

When any man is taking down a building, we do not look upon this as the act of a destroyer, if the design is to erect a better building upon the old foundations. This, God be thanked, is the gracious purpose of our dissolution. The weakness of death leads to the power of the resurrection; corruption is the way to incorruption, mortality to immortality, dishonour to glory. We know that, if our earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

But now we are to observe it, as a main article of our present subject, that this blessedness of death is not general to all mankind, though the Christian redemption is all-suffi

cient

It is not

cient and universal in its nature. said absolutely-blessed are the dead; but blessed are the dead which die in the Lord. A Christian life, then, is the only introduction to a blessed death. Without that, no hope nor encouragement can be gathered from any passage of the Scripture. To die in the Lord, signifies 1. to die a member of his mystical body by baptism. (Upon which consideration we are persuaded, that infants, being baptised, and dying in the state of infancy, are translated to the kingdom of heaven; as certainly as the infants of the Israelitish people were carried over Jordan into Canaan (a figure of heaven) without any preparatory trial in the wilderness.

If they live and grow up, the conditions of salvation change as their capacities change; insomuch that the same baptism, which is sufficient to save an infant, is sufficient only to condemn those who might, but never do, get any farther. As the Christian advances in life, there must be other evidences of his spiritual union with Christ: for as by baptism he is born to a new state; so by faith, by a partaking of the other sacrament, by prayer, and by a godly life, it must appear that he liveth in him unto whom he was born again; leading

leading the rest of his life according to that beginning of it, at which he renounced the World, the Flesh, and the Devil.

For 1. it is written, the just shall live by faith: whence the great end the Apostle aimed at was to win Christ, and be found in him, not having his own righteousness which is of the law, but the righteousness which is of God by faith.

Then, 2. it is necessary that our union. with Christ should be confirmed by the other sacrament of the Lord's Supper; for without this, he himself hath pronounced, that we have no life in us. But this cannot be true, unless the man, who wilfully neglects the communion, may thereby lose what he gained in his baptism.

Prayer is another sign of our abiding in Christ. Where the Spirit of adoption is, it will be employed in supplication to God, who, as a father, bestoweth gifts upon his children that ask him. If a man lives, he breathes : And if the Christian lives by the Spirit of God, the breath of prayer will be a neverfailing sign of it. Whence it is rightly declared, that if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his he is disowned, as a dead

a dead man, who is no longer reckoned a member of society.

And lastly, an holy conversation in godliness and honesty must insure the privileges of our Christian membership. We must be like our Master in temper and behaviour; acting with the simplicity of the sheep, instead of that worldly disposition, which is best expressed by the deceit and subtilty of the Fox. If any man is in Christ Jesus, he is a new creature: he hath put off the old man, with his pride, and his malice, and his covetousness, and hath put on the new man. The image of God is restored in him; for he is created after God (that is, according to that image of God which Adam lost) in righteousness and true holiness. Again St. John saith, He that abideth in him ought so to walk as he also walked which is agreeable to Christ's own declaration-He that abideth in me and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit. From all which this short inference naturally occurs, that to live fruitless, is to die hopeless.

If we examine this matter more attentively, it will appear, that the blessedness of those, who die in the Lord, is said to consist chiefly in these two particulars.

1. That

2. That their works do follow them. St. Peter instructs us that we are all strangers and pilgrims in this world: and what doth the traveller hope for but rest at the end of his Journey? The life of man is represented to us in a very particular manner by the adventures of the Israelites in their passage from Egypt to Canaan. Till it pleased God to look upon their condition, they laboured under a state of cruel bondage, in the service of a merciless and atheistical Tyrant, whose chief delight it was to harrass and oppress them. Under a like tyranny every man is born; and would continue in it for ever, if the same God, who brought his people over the Red Sea, did not vouchsafe to translate him from the dominion of Satan, by conducting him through the waters of baptism. When the people had passed safe over the sea, and were encamped in the wilderness, how many temptations, difficulties and dangers had they to struggle with, under the exercise of which, they wandered about for forty years? In like manner is the life of a Christian full of labour and trouble. He is assaulted with divers lusts and passions which war against the soul. If he hath any con

cern