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thing is holy, nothing is exceilent; and, as already intimated, he is not without the hope that, feebly as the subject may have been conceived and executed, his contemplations upon it will not be altogether unprofitable to any; but especially to minds who, amidst all the attractions of earth, are rising above it, and seeking "the things" which are at God's right hand for

evermore.

No. I.

THE CRISIS; OR, THE SPIRIT ON THE VERGE OF HER DEPARTURE.

How startling is the first conviction that the hand of death has seized us! And how strange and awful are the emotions by which a man of susceptible and thinking mind is all at once hurried and alarmed! He is excited not only at the fearful event before him so terrible to nature, but at the strangeness of the change to which it will lead, so unlike any he has yet experienced. For, oh! he is now upon the eve of some great transition. His mode of being the only mode of being he ever knew— is about to undergo some momentous change. And although not without the hope that such a change will be to his advantage, he yet shudders to approach it, since, the moment he shall

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meet it, he must be wholly separated from earth, and ere he can be separated from earth, the pains and the agonies of death must all be felt. In so awful a position as this, he has never before been placed, and having awoke to a keen perception of it, he is fearfully excited; so that, with all the sufferings of his existing condition and under which he has so often groaned, he trembles at a change so vast as that which is now before him, and would almost sooner bear his earthly being with all its evils than pass into another which he knows not of. For, of the character of the change he must so quickly realize, he can form no conception. How he shall exist when separated from the body-what will be his sensations at the moment of separation-what the objects he shall behold around him-how he shall think-how he shall feel-how he shall act-in that new state of being into which he will almost instantaneously burst-are all involved in mystery to him.

During the existence which he has passed on earth, the now expiring man may have gone through some eventful changes. He may have

often left the place of his abode. He may have even quitted the coasts of his native land for some strange and unknown clime. But the change which is now before him is not only greater than any through which he has already gone, but is awfully mysterious. The journey he is about to make is not only more distant and every way different from any which he has hitherto performed, but is strangely solemn and perplexing. The spot from which he starts is the globe itself: the scene for which he is destined is some other world in the vast creation; while the track which will conduct him to it is unknown to man, since no one of the myriads that have already traced it has ever come back to define it to him. So that if, while standing upon the margin of his beloved land, preparatory to his entire separation from it, many a brave but feeling man is unusually excited-Oh, how strangely solemn and affecting must be the emotions which agitate the mind of him who thinks and feels, while standing, as it were, upon the coasts of earth, preparatory to his embarkation for that undiscovered country-" the bourne whence no tra

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