political conscience and counterfeit affection fill the fore ground; while sceptred parasites, and pinchbeck potentates, tricked on with the shining spoils of plundered empires, and decked with the pilfered crowns of deposed and exiled monarchs, fill and empty the changing scene, with exits and with entrances,' as fleeting and unsubstantial as the progeny of Banquo,-beholds inventive but fruitless art, solicitously decorate the ample stage to conceal the stains of blood-stains as indelible as those which the ambitious wife of the irresolute thane vainly strove to wash from her polluted hands; while in her sleeping delirium she continued to cry, Still here's the smell of blood; The perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten it. But to return to the general question. Let us not inquire whether these unfeeling tempers and selfish habits offend society, and discredit us with the world; but whether they feed our corruptions and put us in a posture unfavourable to all interior improvement; whether they offend God and endanger the soul; whether the gratification of self is the life which the Redeemer taught or lived; whether sensuality is a suitable preparation for that state where God himself, who is a Spirit, will constitute all the happiness of spiritual beings. But these are not the only, perhaps not the greatest dangers. The intellectual vices, the spiritual offences may destroy the soul without much injuring the credit. These have not, like voluptuousness, their seasons of alteration and repose. Here the principle is in continual operation Envy has no interval. Ambition never cools. Pride never sleeps. The principle at least is always awake. An intemperate man is sometimes sober, but a proud man is never humble. Where vanity reigns, she reigns always. These interior sins are more difficult of extirpation, they are less easy of detection; more hard to come at; and, as the citadel holds out after the outworks are taken, these sins of the heart are the latest conquered in the moral warfare. Here lies the distinction between the worldly and the religious man. It is alarm enough for the Christian that he feels any propensities to vice. Against these propensities he watches, strives and prays: and though he is thankful for the victory when he has resisted the temptation, he can feel no elation of heart while conscious of inward dispositions, which nothing but divine grace enables him to keep from breaking out in a flame. He feels that there is no way to obtain the pardon of sin but to leave off sinning: he feels that though repentance is not a Saviour, yet that there can be no salvation where there is no repentance. Above all, he knows that the promise of remission of sin by the death of Christ is the only solid ground of comfort. However correct his present life may be, the weight of past offences would hang so heavy on his conscience, that without the atoning blood of his Redeemer, despair of pardon for the past would leave him hopeless. He would continue to sin, as an extravagant bankrupt who can get no acquittal, would continue to be extravagant, because no present frugality could redeem his former debts. It is sometimes pleaded that the labour attached to persons in high public stations and im. portant employments, by leaving them no time, furnishes a reasonable excuse for the omission of their religious duties. These apologies are never offered for any such neglect in the poor man, though to him every day brings the inevitable return of his twelve hours' labour, without intermission and without mitigation. But surely the more important the station, the higher and wider the sphere of action, the more imperious is the call for religion, not only in the way of example, but even in the way of success; if it be indeed granted that there is such a thing as divine influences, if it be allowed that God has a blessing to bestow. If the ordinary man who has only himself to govern, requires that aid, how urgent is his necessity who has to govern millions! What an awful idea, could we even suppose it realized, that the weight of a nation might rest on the head of him whose heart looks not up for a higher support! Were we alluding to sovereigns, and not to statesmen, we need not look beyond the throne of Great Britain, for the instance of a monarch who has never made the cares attendant on a king, an excuse for neglecting his duty to the King of kings. The politician, the warrior, and the orator, find it peculiarly hard to renounce in themselves that wisdom and strength, to which they believe that the rest of the world are looking up. The man of station or of genius, when invited to the self-denying duties of Christianity, as well as he who has great possessions,' goes away' sorrowing.' But to know that they must end, stamps vanity on all the glories of life; to know that they must end soon, stan ps infatuation, not only on him who sacrifices his conscience for their acquisition, but on him who, though upright in the discharge of his duties, discharges them without any reference to God.-Would the conqueror or the orator reflect when the 'laurel crown is placed on his brow, how soon will it be followed by the cypress wreath,' it would lower the delirium of ambition; it would cool the intoxication of prosperity. There is a general kind of belief in Christianity, prevalent among men of the world, which, by soothing the conscience, prevents self-inquiry. That the holy Scriptures contain the will of God, they do not question; that they contain the best system of morals, they frequently assert: but that they do not feel the necessity of acquiring a correct notion of the doctrines those Scriptures involve. The depravity of man, the atonement inade by Christ, the assistance of the Holy Spirit-these they consider as the metaphysical part of religion, into which it is not of much importance to enter, and by a species of self-flattery, they satisfy themselves with an idea of acceptableness with their Maker, as a state to be attained without the humility, faith, and newness of life which they require, and which are indeed their proper concomitants. A man absorbed in a multitude of secular concerns, decent but unawakened, listens with a kind of respectful insensibility, to the overtures of religion. He considers the church as venera ble from her antiquity, and important from her, of engagements, the mingling pursuits, the very connexion with the state. No one is more alive tumult and hurry have their gratifications. The to her political, nor more dead to her spiritual bustle gives false peace by leaving no leisure importance. He is anxious for her existence, | for reflection. He lays his conscience asleep but indifferent to her doctrines. These he con- with the flattering unction, of good intentions. siders as a general matter in which he has no He comforts himself with the credible pretence individual concern. He considers religious ob- of want of time, and the vague resolution of givservances as something decorous but unreal; as ing up to God the dregs of that life, of the via grave custom made respectable by public usage, gorous season of which he thinks the world and long prescription. He admits that the poor, more worthy. Thus commuting with his Mawho have little to enjoy, and the idle who have ker, life wears away, its close draws near-and little to do, cannot do better than make over to even the poor commutation which was promised God that time which cannot be turned to a more is not made. The assigned hour of retreat either profitable account. Religion, he thinks, may never arrives, or if it does arrive, sloth and senproperly enough employ leisure, and occupy old suality are resorted to, as the fair reward of a age. But though both advance towards himself life of labour and anxiety; and whether he dies with no imperceptible step, he is still at a loss in the protracted pursuit of wealth, or in the ento determine the precise period when the leisure joyment of the luxuries it has earned, he dies in is sufficient, or the age enough advanced. It the trammels of the world. recedes as the destined season approaches. He continues to intend moving, but he continues to stand still. If we do not cordially desire to be delivered from the dominion of these worldly tempers, it is because we do not believe in the condemnation annexed to their indulgence. We may indeed believe it as we believe any other general proposition, or any indifferent fact; but not as truth in which we have a personal concern; not as a danger which has any reference to us. We evince this practical unbelief in the most unequivocal way, by thinking so much more about the most frivolous concern in which we are assured we have an interest, than about this most important of all concerns. Indifference to eternal things, instead of tran. Compare his drowsy Sabbaths with the animation of the days of business, you would not think it was the same man. The one are to be got over, the others are enjoyed. He goes from the dull decencies, the shadowy forms-for such they are to him, of public worship, to the solid realities of his worldly concerns, to the cheerful activities of secular life. These he considers as bounden, almost as exclusive duties. The others indeed may not be wrong, but these he is sure are right. The world is his element. Here he breathes freely his native air. Here he is sub-quilizing the mind, as it professes to do, is, when stantially engaged. Here his whole mind is alive, his understanding broad awake, all his energies are in full play; his mind is all alacrity; his faculties are employed, his capacities are filled; here they have an object worthy of their widest expansion. Here his desires and affections are absorbed. The faint impression of the Sunday's sermon fades away, to be as faintly revived on the Sunday following, again to fade in the succeeding week. To the sermon he brings a formal ceremonious attendance; to the world, he brings all the heart, and soul, and mind, and strength. To the one he resorts in conformity to law and custom; to induce him to resort to the other, he wants no law, no sanction, no invitation, no argument. His will is of the party. His passions are volunteers. The invisible things of heaven are clouded in shadow, are lost in distance. The world is lord of the ascendant. Riches, honours, power fill his mind with brilliant images. They are present, they are certain, they are tangible. They assume form and bulk. In these therefore he cannot be mistaken; in the others he may. The eagerness of competition, the struggle for superiority, the perturbations of ambition, fill his mind with an emotion, his soul with an agitation, his affections with an interest, which, though very unlike happiness, he yet flatters himself is the road to it. This fictitious pleasure, this tumultuous feeling, produces at least that negative satisfac. tion of which he is constantly in search-it keeps him from himself. Even in circumstances where there is no success to prevent a very tempting bait, the mere occupation, the crowd of objects, the succession a thoughtful moment occurs, a fresh subject of uneasiness; because it adds to our peril the hor. ror of not knowing it. If shutting our eyes to a danger would prevent it, to shut them would not only be a happiness but a duty; but to barter eternal safety for momentary ease,is a wretched compromise. To produce this delusion, mere inconsideration is as efficient a cause as the most prominent sin. The reason why we do not value eternal things is, because we do not think of them. The mind is so full of what is present, that it has no room to admit a thought of what is to come. Not only we do not give that attention to a never-dying soul which prudent men give to a common transaction, but we do not even think it worth the care which inconsiderate men give to an inconsiderable one. We complain that life is short, and yet throw away the best part of it, only making over to religion that portion which is good for nothing else; life would be long enough if we assigned its best period to its best purpose. Say not that the requisitions of religion are severe, ask rather if they are necessary. If a thing must absolutely be done, if eternal misery will be incurred by not doing it, it is fruitless to inquire whether it be hard or easy. Inquire only whether it be indispensable, whether it be commanded, whether it be practicable. It is a well known axiom in science, that difficulties are of no weight against demonstrations. The duty on which our eternal state depends, is not a thing to be debated, but done. The duty which is too imperative to be evaded, too important to be neglected, is not to be argued about, but performed. To sin on quietly, because you do not intend to sin always, is to live on a reversion which will probably never be yours. It is one of the striking characters of the Onnipotent that he is strong and patient.' It is a standing evidence of his patience that he is provoked every day.' How beautifully do these characters reflect lustre on each other. If he were not strong, his patience would want its distinguishing perfection. If he were not patient, his strength would instantly crush those who provoke him, not sometimes, but often; not every year, but every day.' It is folly to say that religion drives men to despair; when it only teaches them by a salutary fear to avoid destruction. The fear of God differs from all other fear, for it is accompanied with trust, and confidence, and love. Blessed is the man that feareth alway,' is no paradox to him who entertains this holy fear. It sets him above the fear of ordinary troubles. It fills his heart. He is not discomposed with those inferior apprehensions which unsettle the soul and un-repentance; confess that the forbearance of God, hinge the peace of worldly men. His mind is occupied with one grand concern, and is therefore less liable to be shaken than little minds which are filled with little things. Can that principle lead to despair, which proclaims the mercy of God in Christ Jesus to be greater than all the sins of all the men in the world? Oh you, who have a long space given you for when viewed as coupled with his strength, is his most astonishing attribute! Think of the com panions of your early life; if not your associates in actual vice, if not your confederates in guilty pleasures, yet the sharers of your thoughtless meetings, of your convivial revelry, of your worldly schemes, of your ambitious projectsthink how many of them have been cut off, perhaps without warning, probably without repentance.-They have been represented to their Judge; their doom, whatever it be, is irreversibly fixed; yours is mercifully suspended.Adore the mercy: embrace the suspension. If despair then prevent your return, add not to your list of offences that of doubting of the forgiveness which is sincerely implored. You have already wronged God in his holiness, wrong him not in his mercy. You may offend him more by despairing of his pardon than by all the sins which have made that pardon necessary. Only suppose if they could be permitted to Repentance, if one may venture the bold remark, come back to this world, if they could be allowalmost disarms God of the power to punish. ed another period of trial, how would they spend Hear his style and title as proclaimed by him- their restored life! How cordial would be their self;- The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and penitence, how intense their devotion, how progracious, long suffering and abundant in good-found their humility, how holy their actions! ness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty'-that is, those who by warepented guilt exclude them-seen too late.' selves from the offered mercy. If infidelity or indifference, which is practical infidelity, keep you back, yet, as reasonable beings, ask yourselves a few short questions; For what end was I sent into the world? Is my soul immortal? Am I really placed here in a state of trial, or is this span my all? Is there an eternal state? If there be, will the use I make of this life decide on my condition in that? I know that there is death, but is there a judgment ?' Think then that you have still in your power that for which they would give millions of worlds. Hell,' says a pious writer, 'is truth Be In almost every mind there sometimes float indefinite and general purposes of repentance. The operation of these purposes is often repelled by a real though disavowed scepticism. cause sentence is not executed speedily,' they suspect it has never been pronounced. They therefore think they may safely continue to defer their intended but unshapen purpose.Though they sometimes visit the sick bed of others; though they see how much disease disqualifies for all duties, yet to this period of ineapacity, to this moment of disqualification do they continue to defer this tremendously important concern. Rest not till you have cleared up, I do not say your own evidences for heaven ;--you have much to do before you arrive at that stage-but whether there be any heaven? Ask yourself What an image of the divine condescension whether Christianity is not important enough does it convey, that the goodness of God leadto deserve being inquired into? Whether eter-eth to repentance! It does not barely invite, nal life is not too valuable to be entirely over- but it conducts. Every warning is more or less looked? Whether eternal destruction, if a reali- an invitation; every visitation is a lighter stroke ty, is not worth avoiding ?-If you make these to avert a heavier blow. This was the way in interrogations sincerely, you will make them which the heathen world understood portents practically. They will lead you to examine and prodigies, and on this interpretation of them your own personal interest in these things. they acted. Any alarming warning, whether Evils which are ruining us for want of atten- rational or superstitious, drove them to their temtion to them, lessen, from the moment our atten- ples, their sacrifices, their expiations. Does our tion to them begins. True or false, the question is worth settling. Vibrate then no longer between doubt and certainty. If the evidence be inadmissible, reject it. But if you can once ascertain these cardinal points, then throw away your time if you can, then trifle with eternity if you dare.* An awakening call to public and individual feelings has been recently made, by an observation of an eloquent speaker in the house of commons. He remarked that himself and the honourable member for Yorkshire, then sitting on a committee appointed on occasion of a great national calamity, were the only surviving members of the committee on a similar occasion twenty-two years ago! The call is the more alarming, because the mortality did not arise from some extraordinary cause, which might not again occur, but was in the common course of human things. Such a proportion of deaths is perpetually taking place, but the very frequency which ought to excite attention prevents it, till it is thus forced on our notice. clearer light always carry us farther? Does it in these instances, always carry us as far as natural conscience carried them? able doom, our instant transition to that state of unutterable bliss or unimaginable wo to which death will in a moment consign us. Such a mental representation would assist us in dissipating the illusion of the senses, would help to realise what is invisible, and approximate what we think remote. It would disenchant us from the world, tear off her painted mask, shrink her pleasures into their proper dimensions, her concerns into their real value, her enjoyments into their just compass, her promises into nothing. The final period of the worldly man at length arrives; but he will not believe his danger. Even if he fearfully glance round for an intimation of it in every surrounding face, every face, it is too probable, is in a league to deceive him. What a noble opportunity is now offered to the Christian physician to show a kindness as far superior to any he has ever shown, as the concerns of the soul are superior to those of the body? Oh let him not fear prudently to reveal Terrible as the evil is, if it must, and that at a truth for which the patient may bless him in no distant day, be met, spare not to present it to eternity! Is it not sometimes to be feared that your imagination; not to lacerate your feelings, in the hope of prolonging for a little while the but to arm your resolution; not to excite unproexistence of the perishing body, he robs the ne-fitable distress, but to strengthen your faith. If ver-dying soul of its last chance of pardon? Does not the concern for the immortal part united with his care of the afflicted body, bring the medical professor to a nearer imitation than any other supposable situation can do, of that Divine Physician, who never healed the one without manifesting a tender concern for the other? it terrify you at first, draw a little nearer to it every time. Familiarity will abate the terror. If you cannot face the image, how will you encounter the reality? Let us then figure to ourselves the moment (who can say that moment may not be the next?) when all we cling to shall elude our grasp; when every earthly good shall be to us as if it had But the deceit is short, is fruitless. The never been, except in the remembrance of the amazed spirit is about to dislodge. Who shall use we have made of it; when our eyes shall speak its terror and dismay? Then he cries close upon a world of sense, and open on a world out in the bitterness of his soul, What capacity of spirits; when there shall be no relief for the has a diseased man, what time has a dying man, fainting body, and no refuge for the parting what disposition has a sinful man to acquire soul, except that single refuge to which, pergood principles, to unlearn false notions, to re-haps, we have never thought of resorting-that nounce bad practices, to establish right habits, to begin to love God, to begin to hate sin? How is the stupendous concern of salvation to be worked out by a mind incompetent to the most ordinary concerns. refuge which if we have not despised we have too probably neglected-the everlasting mercies of God in Christ Jesus. Reader! whoever you are, who have neglected to remember that to die is the end for which you The infinite importance of what he has to do were born, know that you have a personal in-the goading conviction that it must be done-terest in this scene. Turn not away from it in the utter inability of doing it-the dreadful combination in his mind of both the necessity and incapacity-the despair of crowding the concerns of an age into a moment-the impossibility of beginning a repentance which should have been completed-of setting about a peace which should have been concluded-of suing for a pardon which should have been obtained;-all these complicated concerns-without strength, without time, without hope, with a clouded memory, a disjointed reason, a wounded spirit, undefined terrors, remembered sins, anticipated punishment, an angry God, and accusing conscience, altogether, intolerably augment the sufferings of a body which stands in little need of the insupportable burthen of a distracted mind to aggravate its torments. Though we pity the superstitious weakness of the German emperor in acting over the anticipated solemnities of his own funeral-that eccentric act of penitence of a great but perverted mind; it would be well if we were now and then to represent to our minds while in sound health, the solemn certainties of a dying bed; if we were sometimes to imagine to our selves this awful scene, not only as inevitable, but as near; if we accustomed ourselves to see things now, as we shall then wish we had seen them. Surely the most sluggish insensibility must be roused by figuring to itself the rapid approach of death, the nearness of our unalter disdain, however feebly it may have been repre sented. You may escape any other evil of life, but its end you cannot escape. Defer not then its weightiest concern to its weakest period. Begin not the preparation when you should be completing the work. Delay not the business which demands your best faculties to the period of their debility, probably of their extinction. Leave not the work which requires an age to do, to be done in a moment, a moment too which may not be granted. The alternative is tremendous. The difference is that of being saved or lost. It is no light thing to perish! CHAP. XIX. Happy Deaths. FEW circumstances contribute more fatally to confirm in worldly men that insensibility to eternal things which was considered in the preceding chapter, than the boastful accounts we sometimes hear of the firm and heroic deathbeds of popular but irreligious characters. Many causes contribute to these happy deaths as they are called. The blind are bold, they do not see the precipice they despise.-Or perhaps there is less unwillingness to quit a world which has so often disappointed them, or which they have sucked to the last dregs. They leave life with less reluctance, feeling that they have exhausted all its gratifications. Or it is a disbelief of the reality of the state on which they are about to enter. Or it is a desire to be released from excessive pain, a desire naturally felt by those who calculate their gain rather by what they are escaping from, than by what they are to receive. -Or it is equability of temper, or firmness of nerve, or hardness of mind.-Or it is the arrogant wish to make the last act of life confirm its preceding professions.-Or it is the vanity of perpetuating their philosophic character.Or if some faint ray of light break in, it is the pride of not retracting the sentiments which from pride they have maintained ;-The desire of posthumous renown among their own party; the hope to make their disciples stand firm by their example; the ambition to give their last possible blow to revelation-or perhaps the fear of expressing doubts which might beget a suspicion that their disbelief was not so sturdy as they would have it thought. Above all, may they not, as a punishment for their long neglect of the warning voice of truth, be given up to a strong delusion to believe the lie they have so often propagated, and really to expect to find in death that eternal sleep, with which they have affected to quiet their own consciences, and have really weakened the faith of others? Every new instance is an additional buttress on which the sceptical school lean for support, and which they produce as a fresh triumph. With equal satisfaction they collect stories of infirmity, depression, and want of courage in the dying hour of religious men, whom the nature of the disease, timorousness of spirit, profound humility, the sad remembrance of sin, though long repented of and forgiven, a deep sense of the awfulness of meeting God in judgment;-whom some or all of these causes may occasion to depart in trembling fear: in whom, though heaviness may endure through the night of death, yet joy cometh in the morning of the resurrection. It is a maxim of the civil law that definitions are hazardous. And it cannot be denied that various descriptions of persons have hazarded much in their definitions of a happy death. A very able and justly admired writer, who has distinguished himself by the most valuable works on political economy, has recorded as proofs of the happy death of a no less celebrated contemporary, that he cheerfully amused himself in his last hours with Lucian, a game of whist, and some good humoured drollery upon Charon and his boat. ་ But may we not venture to say, with one of the people called Christians,'* himself a wit and philosopher, though of the school of Christ, that the man who could meet death in such a frame of mind, might smile over Babylon in ruins, esteem the earthquake which destroyed Lisbon an agreeable occurrence, and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his overthrow in the Red Sea.' great intellectual powers it is as impossible not to admire, as not to lament their unhappy mis. application, has been eulogized by his friend, as coming nearer than almost any other man, to the perfection of human nature in his life; and has been almost deified for the cool courage and heroic firmness with which he met death. His eloquent panegyrist, with as insidious an inuendo as has ever been thrown out against revealed religion, goes on to observe, that perhaps it is one of the very worst circumstances against Christianity, that very few of its professors were ever either so moral, so humane, or could so philosophically govern their passions, as the sceptical David Hume.' Yet notwithstanding this rich embalming of so noble a compound of matter and motion,' we must be permitted to doubt one of the two things presented for our admiration; we must either doubt the so much boasted happiness of his death, or the so much extolled humanity of his heart. We must be permitted to suspect the soundness of that benevolence which led him to devote his latest hours to prepare, under the label of an Essay on Suicide, a potion for posterity of so deleterious a quality, that if taken by the patient, under all the circumstances in which he undertakes to prove it innocent, might have gone near to effect the extinction of the whole human race. For if all rational beings, according to this posthumous prescription, are at liberty to procure their own release from life, under pain or sickness, shame or poverty,' how large a portion of the world would be authorized to quit it uncalled! For how many are subject to the two latter grievances; from the two former how few are altogether exempt!* The energy of that ambition which could concentrate the last efforts of a powerful mind, the last exertions of a spirit greedy of fame, into a project not only for destroying the souls, but for abridging the lives of his fellow creatures, leaves at a disgraceful distance the inverted thirst of glory of the man, who to immortalize his own name, set fire to the Temple at Ephesus. Such a burning zeal to annihilate the eternal hope of his fellow creatures might be philosophy; but surely to authorise them to curtail their moral existence, which to the infidel who looks for no other, must be invaluable, was not philanthropy. But if this death was thought worthy of being blazoned to the public eye in all the warm and glowing colours with which affection decorates panegyric; the disciples of the same school have been in general, anxiously solicitous to produce only the more creditable instances of invincible hardness of heart, while they have laboured to cast an impenetrable veil over the closing scene of those among the less inflexible of the faternity, who have established in their departing moments, any symptoms of doubt, any indica Another part of the Essay on Suicide, has this passage,- Whenever pain or sorrow so far overcome my patience, as to make me tired of life, I may conclude that I am recalled from my station in the plainest and most express terms.' And again-When I fall upon This eminent historian and philosoper, whose my own sword, I receive my death equally from the hands of the Deity, as if it had proceeded from a lion, a precipice, or a fever. And again- Where is the crime The late excellent Bishop Horne. See his letters to of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural Dr. Adam Smith. channel.' |