he to them, the time is short, the day approaches, the Lord is at the gate, and He will not delay; rejoice then; I again say to you, rejoice. Such was the only consolation of men, persecuted, insulted, prescribed, trampled upon, regarded as the scum of the earth, the disgrace of the Jews, and the scoff of the Gentiles. They knew that death would soon dry up their tears; that for them there would then be neither mourning, sorrow, nor suffering; that all would be changed;" and that thought softened every pain. Ah! whosoever had told these generous justifiers of faith, that the Lord would never make them know death, but would leave them to dwell for ever on the earth; would have shaken their faith, tempted their constancy, and, by robbing them of that hope, would have deprived them of every consolation.

You, my brethren, are no doubt little surprised at this, because death must appear a refuge to men afflicted and unhappy as they were. You are mistaken; it was neither their persecutions nor sufferings which occasioned their distress and sorrow; these were their joy, consolation, and pride: We glory, said they, in tribulations: It was the state of separation from Jesus Christ in which they still lived; that alone was the source of their tears, and what rendered death so desirable.

While we are in the body, said the Apostle, we are separated from the Lord; and that separation was a state of anguish and sorrow to these faithful Christians: Piety consists in wishing for a re-union with Jesus Christ our Head; in sighing for the happy moment which shall incorporate us with the chosen of God, in that mystical company, which, from the beginning of the world, has been forming, of every tongue, every tribe, and every nation; which is the completion of the de

signs of God, and which will glorify him, with Jesus Christ, to all eternity. In this world we are like branches torn from their stem; like strangers wandering in a foreign land; like fettered captives in a prison, waiting their deliverance; like children, banished for a time from their paternal inheritance and mansion; in a word, like members separated from their body. Since Jesus Christ, our head, ascended to heaven, the earth is no longer the place of our establishment; we look forward, in blessed expectation, to the coming of the Lord; that desire constitutes all our piety and consolation: And for a Christian, not to desire that happy moment, but to dread, and even look upon it as a misfortune, is to fly in the face of Jesus Christ; to renounce all communication with him; to reject the promises of faith, and the glorious title of a citizen of heaven; it is to centre our happiness in the things of the earth; to doubt of a future state; to regard religion as a dream, and to believe that all dies with us.

No, my brethren, death has nothing to a just soul, but what is pleasing and desirable: Arrived at that happy moment, he, without regret, sees a world perish which he had never loved, and which to him had never appear ed otherwise than a mass of vanity: His eyes close with pleasure on all those vain shows which the earth offers, which he had always regarded as the splendour of a moment, and whose dangerous illusions he had never ceased to dread: He feels, without uneasiness, what do I say? with satisfaction-that mortal body, which had been the subject of all his temptations, and the fatal source of all his follies, become clothed with immortality: He regrets nothing on the earth, where he leaves nothing, and from whence his heart flies along with his

soul: He even complains not that he is cut off in the middle of his career, and that his days are concluded in the flower of his age: On the contrary, he thanks his deliverer for having abridged his sufferings with his years, for having exacted only a portion of his debt as the price of his eternity, and for having speedily consummated his sacrifice, lest a longer residence in a corrupt world should have perverted his heart. His trials and mortifications, which had cost so much to the weakness of the flesh, are then his sweetest reflections: He sees that every thing vanishes, except what he has done for God; that all now abandon him; his riches, relations, friends, and dignities, his works alone remaining; and he is transported with joy, to think that he had never placed his trust in the favour of princes, in the children of men, in the vain hopes of fortune, in things which must soon perish, but in the Lord alone, who remaineth eternally, and in whose bosom he is about experience that peace and tranquility, which mortals cannot bestow. Thus tranquil with regard to the past, despising the present, transported to touch at last that futurity, the sole object of his desires; already seeing the bosom of Abraham open to receive him, and the Son of man seated at the right hand of his Father, holding out for him the crown of immortality; he sleeps in the Lord: he is wafted by blessed spirits to the habitation of the holy, and returns to the place whence he originally

came.

May your latter end my brethren, be like this,

Amen.

SERMON X.

ON THE DEATH OF THE SINNER, AND OF THE RIGHTEOUS.

REV. xiv. 13.

Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord.

THE passions of man have something in them striking and incomprehensible. All men wish to live; they look upon death as the most dreadful of evils; all their passions attach them to life; yet, nevertheless, those very passions incessantly urge them towards that death, for which they feel so much horror; and it would seem that they only live in order to accelerate the moment of death.

All men flatter themselves, that they shall die the death of the righteous; they hope and desire it. Knowing the impossibility of remaining for ever upon earth, they trust that, before the arrival of their last moment, the passions, which at present pollute and hold them in Vol. I.

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captivity, will be extinct. They figure to themselves, the lot of a sinner who expires in his iniquity, and under the wrath of God, as the most horrible destiny, yet, nevertheless, they tranquilly prepare the same lot for themselves. This dreadful termination of human life, which is death in sin, strikes and appals them; yet, like fools, they pursue with satisfaction the road that leads to it. In vain do we announce to them, that in general men die as they have lived: They would live the life of the sinner, and yet, die the death of the righteous.

My intention, at present, is not to undeceive you with regard to an illusion so common, and so ridiculous, which shall be reserved for another occasion; but, since the death of the righteous appears so earnestly to be wished for, and that of the sinner so dreadful to you, I mean, by a representation of them both, to excite your desires for the one, and to awaken your just terrors for the other. As you must finally quit this world in one of these two situations, it is proper to familiarize yourselves to the spectacle, that, by placing before your eyes the melancholy picture of the last, and the soothing image of the first, you may be enabled to judge which of the two destinies awaits you; and, consequently, to adopt the necessary means to secure the decision in your favour.

In the picture of the expiring sinner, you will see in what shall terminate all the glory and all the pleasures of the world; from the recital of the last moments of the righteous, you will learn to what virtue conducts, in spite of all its troubles. In the one, you will see the world as it appears to the eye of a sinner in the moment of death; and how vain, frivolous, and different from what it seems at present, will it then appear to you! In