CHAPTER XXVII.

TO THE SAME-CLOSELY PRESSED.

T never surprises me to find a man groping in vain after truth, who has refused to believe the testimony

of God's word! Notwithstanding all you have said against the Bible, the wants, the inquiries, the yearnings of your nature are more fully met in that book, than in any other book or system our world has to offer. The virtues enjoined there are the best for soul and body; and the vices forbidden there are injurious to both. Facts these, to which all men can bear witness more or less. The whole medical faculty, as with one voice, testify to them; and so do the newspapers of the day-those heralds through which we learn how God is governing the world.

What are we to say to these facts? What are we to learn? What inference draw from them? This: that the Creator of man is the Author of the Bible! If the virtues enjoined in the Scriptures, and the vices prohibited, produced the contrary effects upon men, I confess it would greatly stumble me in coming to such a conclusion. And I appeal to yourself whether it would not be one of your strongest arguments against the book? But so long as the well-being of mind and body, with length of days, are promoted by the observance of such Bible

injunctions and prohibitions—and the ill-being of both, with abridgment of life, the effect of the non-observance of themyou must admit I have a strong argument in favor of the book!

Another, though lesser argument, is worthy your attention. The enemies of the Bible are those who practise the vices it condemns; and the friends of it, those who practise the virtues it enjoins. The bad hate it; the good love it. To what conclusion should this lead us?

Time forbids me to enlarge. Death-bed testimonies are often convincing. Who ever heard a dying sinner regret that he had not lived a more vicious life? or that the Bible and religion were not opposed with more energy and success?—unless, to use the sad remark of one, God was about to suffer him to drop into the fiery lake, with a senseless heart and a seared conscience, leaning upon a lie! But how is it with the godly on such occasions? Who ever heard any of these regret, in their dying moments, their faithfulness to God? or wish that they had been less religiously disposed? less devoted to God? less attached to the Bible? less zealous for the advancement of its truth? less in prayer and at the ordinances of God's house, through life? Not one! On the contrary, they usually regret that they were not more faithful in all these particulars. The testimony of one now in eternity is worthy of being repeated here: "Piety is no matter for repentance. Does a child of God speak against sin and sinners, and for a sober and holy life? He will do so to the last! Death, judgment, and a nearer approach to eternity shall not change his mind, but confirm it." Ah! sir, how many of those who speak against religion and Christians, when in health,

ask their prayers and pine for their hopes and comforts in death!

Let us keep temper, friend! Bad humor hurts digestion: true, doubtless, in didactics as in dietetics! For my part, I have often proved the wisdom of the old Asiatic: "Measure every man with his own measure—that is, do not expect or require from him more than is in him." I can easily make allowance for you. Nevertheless, for your own sake examine the subject calmly, with less of prejudice, and be not over anxious for victory.

Indifference to death! A mere bravado, more likely, or a play upon words, or a scintillation of the fancy!

"So like the borealis race,

Which flit ere you can mark the place!"

flitting over the surface of the soul in vast uncertainties, or playing over the heart, like cold moonbeams over a snow-drift, warming nothing, melting nothing! It is a sorry plea to make the soul glad by an imposition both upon memory, conscience, reason, and judgment; for all these have had something to say upon this subject in bygone days, and they shall again, depend upon it! Job spoke of "a land of darkness and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness" to the buried dead. The heart may be but the tomb of buried principles, and of dead hopes and fears, which are to have a resurrection by and by! Athwart the gloom of that heartthine, I mean-there may, perchance, stray a beam of light, dispersing itself like a ray through some chink in a sepulchre, "darting uncertain brightness for a moment, faint and precari

ous," where "the light is as darkness," leaving the mind oscillating like a pendulum between indifference and suspense, until some moving shadow in the sepulchral gloom determines it unto unquietness.

There have been shadows passing through your heart lately, or I am mistaken

unquiet, disowned principles and fears-ambassadors from heaven at the court of your conscience, and the representatives of the truth of the religion of Jesus Christ in years gone by, but slain by infidelity, but are now risen from the dead like the "two witnesses" in Rev. xi. 3-13, or like unto the dead which rose from the dead after our Lord's resurrection and appeared unto many-looking at you as they did at Jerusalem, when they turned their rayless eyes, covered with the frosts of death, upon a city devoted to destruction!

"Oh! a haunted heart is a weight to bear!"

Indifference to death! more than doubtful, except when under the influence of an exhilaration not natural to your habitual state of mind. I believe with one who understood well what he said, that death can never be indifferent till man is assured—which none was ever yet-that, with his breath, his being passes into nothing; that it matters little, whether his hopes and fears steer by the chart and compass of a formal creed, or drift along the shoreless sea of faithless conjecture, a possible eternity can never be indifferent; that the idea of extinction is not terrible, simply because man cannot form such an idea at all! Let a man, he continued, try as long as he will—

let him negative every conceived and conceivable form of future existence, he is as far as ever from having exhausted the infinitude of possibility-imagination will continually produce the line of consciousness through limitless darkness; adding, many are the devices of fancy to relieve the soul from the dead weight of unideal nothing!

Allow a question: Are you entirely unfamiliar in the privacy of your own thoughts with those youthful moanings of Henry Kirke White, "communing lonely with his sinking soul," looking death in the face the while, and, in the solemn midnight hour, feeling that his sickness was unto death?—the poet, you are aware, died young:

"Yes, I do feel my soul recoil within me,

As I contemplate death's grim gulf,

The shuddering void, the awful blank-futurity!
And it is hard

To feel the hand of death arrest one's steps,

Throw a chill blight o'er all one's budding hopes,
And hurl one's soul untimely to the shades,

Lost in the gaping gulf of blank oblivion."

How solemn! how dirge-like! What comfort could infidelity afford? Comfort he had, but it came not from thence. He sought it not there; no, but in the religion of the Gospel! What a relief in the closing lines!

*

"And my tired soul, with emulative haste,

Looks to its God, and prunes its wings for heaven."

It is but doing injustice to yourself-a piece of self-imposition-to infer your feelings at death from what you feel now, The difference may be very great, unless God suffer you to die