led lustre and attraction even in that gloomy portal of the grave, through which we are to enter on such

glorious progress.

Meantime, let not the duties of this life, however lowly and homely, be neglected; for they alone can make us ready for the life to come. Not that death is an evil even for the man who has lived unfaithful. When a man has perverted and abused his body and soul by habits of sin, it may be oftentimes, in God's mercy, the best thing for him to die, and to have his present inveterately vicious course interrupted and broken up, into whatever purgatory of future discipline he may enter.

But the good man's approach to that dark valley, which alone separates him from the heavenly hills, should figure itself to us in the likeness of a triumph. His expiring sighs should sound in our ears but as the soft prelude of divine exultations; and the groan with which he dies swell into the shout of victory over all pain, sickness, temptation and sorrow. "I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, shall give me at that day." Kingdoms may be shaken, old dynasties may fall, and nations rise in their might to reconstruct the fabrics of earthly rule; but there is mightier and more blessed change than this, in the departure of the good from all transpiring beneath the sun. For, placed in whatever earthly sphere, exercising a holy virtue in the tasks of the busy world, or making

the beautiful sacrifices of love and devotion in the domestic scene; though encountering trouble, and prostrated with anguish, the good man has ever, as one has said,

"Three firm friends, more sure than day and night, Himself, his Maker, and the angel Death."

DISCOURSE XIV.

THE DEAD SPEAKING.

Heb. xi. 4. AND BY IT HE, BEING DEAD, YET SPEAKETH.

THE powers of language have been exhausted in describing the shortness and feebleness of human life. It is a shadow that fleeth. It is a vapor that vanisheth. It is a flower that fadeth. It is grass that withereth. Generation after generation passes away, like the clouds that chase one another over the landscape. Such is the representation, and it expresses truly one aspect of mortal existence. But it does not express the whole. There is a very large and important exception to be made to it, and that exception it is my purpose now to state.

Human creatures die, but the dead speak: they exert an influence on the living world. Six thousand years ago, and four thousand years before the words of our text were written, Abel, a keeper of sheep, brought of the firstlings of his flock an offering unto the Lord, an outward expression of the reverence of heart with which his spirit bowed before the majesty of heaven and earth. He laid his sacrifice on the altar, and died in the morning of exist

ence, in the dew of his youth; his fair and glorious promise blasted before his parents' eyes, his innocent blood shed by an envious brother's hands. Even like the tender stalk he was cut off, and no man knoweth the place of his burial. But, though dead, he spoke; spoke through the sincere fervor of his worship to God; spoke through the unresisting meekness with which he sank under the smiting murderer; spoke in the voice of his blood that cried from the ground. And that first altar of the race which he reared seems still to smoke up to heaven; it excites feelings of adoration, even to this day, in unnumbered bosoms; it makes our hearts throb with the self-same worship.

Every religious act will not operate so strongly ; but it may operate as long. This is the nature of all influence, physical or moral. A motion, once begun, continues in some shape or combination for ever; and so moral character is self-productive without end, and our temporary existence will leave behind an element of power for the permanent weal or woe of our fellow-men. What consideration should so affect us? What is the posthumous fame which some hope to secure in the mouths and mention of men, compared with the privilege of working a purifying principle into the mind and heart of those who shall come after us? But there is another side to the picture. The evil that we do shall also live after us. Cain spoke as well as Abel; spoke in the voice, not of piety, but of unholy passion; not of meeknese, but of revenge; not of solemn appeal to God's mercy, but of impious defiance to his justice.

There is thus a double solemnity in the life that we lead. We believe we are to be judged at God's bar for the deeds done in the body; but by those same deeds we are doomed to help or hurt all with whom we are or shall be connected here below, till the last circulation and throbbing of a heart that shall claim kindred with or be cognizant of our own. This is not an arbitrary decree it is the necessary condition of human life. We influence others according to our characters continually while we live. But death has a peculiar power of bringing out distinctly the characters of the departed. With what lively and deep impression it paints their portraits! Resisting the effacing fingers of time and mortality, how it clears up the features and deepens the lines, perhaps before dim to us, in the chambers of the heart! No pencil has truth and force like that of death. Nothing will reveal us like death to those we are to leave behind.

The subject requires you to take a position which perhaps you have not attempted; to transport yourselves in imagination to the other side of the grave, and from that point contemplate the continued effects of your life. It is a sober and monitory, and at the same time a cheering and inspiring doctrine. By the force of mingled alarm and exultation, it calls on us to take heed to our ways. One might think the joyful side of the alternative would alone suffice to make every man good and faithful. Think of it. Your example of fidelity in the earthly post of duty where Providence has placed you, shall not only