tions of distrust, respecting the validity of their | and infidelity, continue with fatal success to principles-Principles which they had long maintained with so much zeal, and disseminated with so much industry. In spite of the sedulous anxiety of his satellites to conceal the clouded setting of the great luminary of modern infidelity, from which so many minor stars have filled their little urns, and then set up for original lights themselves; in spite of the pains taken-for we must drop metaphor -to shroud from all eyes, except those of the initiated, the terror and dismay with which the Philosopher of Geneva met death, met his summons to appear before that God whose providence he had ridiculed, that Saviour whose character and offices he had vilified, the secret was betrayed. In spite of the precautions taken by his associates to bury in congenial darkness the agonies which in his last hours contradicted the audacious blasphemies of a laborious life spent in their propagation, at last like his great instigator, he believed and trembled. Whatever the sage of Ferney might be in the eyes of Journalists, of Academicians, of Eney: clopædists, of the Royal Author of Berlin, of Revolutionists in the egg of his own hatching, of full grown infidels of his own spawning; of a world into which he had been for more than half a century industriously infusing a venom, the effects of which will be long felt, the expiring philosopher was no object of veneration to his NURSE. She could have recorded a tale to harrow up the soul,' the horrors of which were sedulously attempted to be consigned to oblivion. But for this woman and a few other unbribed witnesses, his friends would probably have endeavoured to edify the world with this addition to the brilliant catalogue of happy deaths.* make successive proselytes through successive ages-if their works last so long, and thus accumulate on themselves anguish ever growing, miseries ever multiplying, without hope of any mitigation, without hope of any end! A more recent instance of the temper and spirit which the College of Infidelity exhibits on these occasions is perhaps less generally known. A person of our own time and country, of high rank and talents, and who ably filled a great public situation, had unhappily in early life, imbibed principles and habits analogous to these of a notoriously profligate society of which he was a member, a society, of which the very appellation it delighted to distinguish itself by, is Offence and torture to the sober ear. In the near view of death, at an advanced age, deep remorse and terror took possession of his soul; but he had no friend about him to whom he could communicate the state of his mind, or from whom he could derive either counsel or consolation. One day in the absence of his attendants he raised his exhausted body on his dying bed, and threw himself on the floor, where he was found in great agony of spirit, with a prayer-book in his hand. This detection was at once a subject for ridicule and regret to his colleagues, and he was contemptuously spoken of as a pusillanimous deserter from the good cause. The phrase used by them to express their displeasure at his apostacy is too offensive to find a place here. Were we called upon to decide between the two rival horrors, we should feel no hesitation in pronouncing this death a less unhappy one than those to which we have before alluded. health, took measures by a special order, to Another well known sceptic, while in perfect guard against any intrusion in his last sickness, by which he might, even in the event that there might be any hereafter; or in any of delirium, betray any doubtful apprehension other way be surprised in uttering expressions of terror, and thus exposing the state of his mind, in case any such revolution should take place, which his heart whispered him might possibly happen. It has been a not uncommon opinion that the works of an able and truly pious Christian, by their happy tendency to awaken the careless and to convince the unbelieving, may, even for ages after the excellent author is entered into his eternal rest, by the accession of new converts which they bring to Christianity, continue to add increasing brightness to the crown of the already glorified saint. If this be true, how shall imagination presume to conceive, much less how shall language express, what must be expected in the contrary case? How shall we dare turn our thoughts to the progres-close a life of avowed impiety, is there great But not only in those happy deaths which sive torments which may be ever heaping on the heads of those unhappy men of genius, who without acknowledged infidelity, there has been room for suspicion, but even in cases where have devoted their rare talents to promote vice a careless life; when in such cases we hear of a sudden death-bed revolution, of much seeming contrition, succeeded by extraordinary professions of joy and triumph, we should be very cautious of pronouncing on their real state. Let us rather leave the penitent of a day to that mercy against which he has been sinning through a whole life. These 'Clinical Converts,' (to borrow a favourite phrase of the eloquent bishop Taylor,) may indeed be true penitents; but how shall we pronounce them to be so?How can we conclude that they are dead unto sin' unless they are spared to live unto righte It is a well attested fact, that this woman, after his decease, being sent for to attend another person in dying circumstances, anxiously inquired if the patient was a gentleman; for that she had recently been so dreadfully terrified in witnessing the dying horrors of Mons. de Voltaire, which surpassed all description, that she had resolved never to attend any other person of that sex unless she could be assured that he was not a philo. sopher. Voltaire, indeed, as he was deficient in the moral honesty and the other good qualities, which obtained for Mr. Hume the affection of his friends, wanted his sincerity. Of all his other vices, hypocrisy was the consummation While he daily dishonoured the Re deemer by the invention of unheard of blasphemies: after he had bound himself by a solemn pledge never to rest till he had exterminated his very name from the face of the earth, he was not ashamed to assist regularly at the awful commemoration of his death at the altar! ousness?' *The writer had this anecdote from an acquaintance of the noble person at the time of his death. Happily we are not called upon to decide. ¡ dead, charity, though well understood, is often He to whose broad eye the future and the past mistakingly exercised. lie open, as he has been their constant witness, so will he be their unerring judge.* But the admirers of certain happy deaths, do not even pretend that any such change appeared in the friends of whom they make not so much the panegyric as the apotheosis. They would even think repentance a derogation from the dignity of their character. They pronounce them to have been good enough as they were; insisting that they have a demand for happiness upon God, if there be any such Being; a claim upon heaven, if there be any such place. They are satisfied that their friend, after a life spent 'without God in the world,' without evidencing any marks of a changed heart, without even affecting any thing like repentance, without intimating that there was any call for it, DIED PRONOUNCING HIMSELF HAPPY. If we were called upon to collect the greatest quantity of hyperbole-falsehood might be too harsh a term-in the least given time and space, we should do well to search for it in those sacred edifices expressly consecrated to truth. There we should see the ample mass of canonizing kindness which fills their mural decorations, expressed in all those flattering records inscrib. ed by every variety of motive to every variety of claim. In addition to what is dedicated to real merit by real sorrow, we should hear of tears which were never shed, grief which was never felt, praise which was never earned; we should see what is raised by the decent demands of connexion, by tender, but undiscerning friendship, by poetic licence, by eloquent gratitude for testamentary favours. It is an amiable though not a correct feeling But nothing is more suspicious than a happy in human nature, that, fancying we have not death, where there has neither been religion in done justice to certain characters during their the life nor humility in its close, where its course lives, we run into the error of supposed comhas been without piety, and its termination with-pensation by over estimating them after their out repentance. decease. Others in a still bolder strain, disdaining the On account of neighbourhood, affinity, long posthumous renown to be conferred by survi-acquaintance, or some pleasing qualities, we vers, of their having died happily, prudently secure their own fame, and changing both the tense and the person usual in monumental inscriptions, with prophetic confidence record on their own sepulchral marble, that they shall die not only HAPPY,' but 'GRATEFUL,'-the prescience of philosophy thus assuming as certain what the humble spirit of Christianity only presumes to hope. may have entertained a kindness for many persons, of whose state however, while they lived, we could not with the utmost stretch of charity think favourably. If their sickness has been long and severe, our compassion having been kept by that circumstance in a state of continued excitement, though we lament their death, yet we feel thankful that their suffering is at an end. Forgetting our former opinion, and the course There is another reason to be assigned for of life on which it was framed, we fall into all the charitable error of indiscriminately consign-the common-place of consolation,-* God is mering our departed acquaintance to certain hap. ciful-we trust that they are at rest—what a piness. Affliction, as it is a tender, so it is a happy release they have had !'-Nay, it is well misleading feeling; especially in minds na-if we do not go so far as to entertain a kind of turally soft, and but slightly tinctured with re. vague belief that their better qualities joined to ligion. The death of a friend awakens the their sufferings have, on the whole, ensured kindest feelings of the heart. But by exciting their felicity. true sorrow, it often excites false charity. Grief Thus at once losing sight of that word of God naturally softens every fault, love as naturally which cannot lie, of our former regrets on their heightens every virtue. It is right and kind subject, losing the remembrance of their defecto consign error to oblivion, but not to immor- tive principles and thoughtless conduct; without tality. Charity indeed we owe to the dead as any reasonable ground for altering our opinion, well as to the living, but not that erroneous any pretence for entertaining a better hope-we charity by which truth is violated, and unde-assume that they are happy. We reason as if served commendation lavished on those whom truth could no longer injure. To calumniate the dead is even worse than to violate the rights of sepulture; not to vindicate calumniated worth, when it can no longer vindicate itself, is a crime next to that of attacking it ; but on the we believed that the suffering of the body had purchased the salvation of the soul, as if it had rendered any doubt almost criminal. We seem ously rescues his reputation from the assaults of ma. lignity, was given by the late excellent bishop Porteus, in his animated defence of archbishop Secker! May his own fair fame never stand in need of any such warm *The primitive church carried their incredulity of vindication, which, however, it could not fail to find in the appearances of repentance so far as to require not the bosom of every good man! The fine talents of this only years of sorrow for sin, but perseverance in piety, lamented prelate, uniformly devoted to the purposes for before they would admit offenders to their communion; which God gave them-his life directed to those duties and as a test of their sincerity, required the uniform to which his high professional station called him-bis practice of those virtues most opposite to their former Christian graces-those engaging manners which shed vices. Were this made the criterion now, we should a soft lustre on the firm fidelity of his friendships-that not so often hear such flaming accounts of converts, so kindness which was ever flowing from his heart to ins exultingly reported, before time has been allowed to try lips-the benignity and candour which distinguished their stability. More especially we should not hear of not his conversation only, but his conduct-these and so many triumphant relations of death-bed converts, in all those amiable qualities, that gentle temper and corwhom the symptoms must frequently be too equivocal rect cheerfulness with which he adorned society, will to admit the positive decision of human wisdom. ever endear his memory to all who knew him intimateWhat a generous instance of that disinterested at-ly; and let his friends remember, that to imitate his vir tachment which survives the grave of its object and pi- tues, will be the best proof of their remembering theins to make ourselves easy on the falsest ground | feared to admonish, and that because we loved imaginable, not because we believe their hearts him; for whom, though we saw his danger, yet were changed, but because they are now beyond perhaps we neglected to pray; to see him all possibility of change. brought to that ultimate and fixed state in which admonition is impossible, in which prayer is not only fruitless, but unlawful. But surely the mere circumstance of death will not have rendered them fit for that heaven for which we before feared they were unfit. Far be it from us, indeed, blind and sinful as we are, to pass sentence upon them, to pass sentence upon any. We dare not venture to pronounce what may have passed between God and their souls, even at the last hour. We know that infinite mercy is not restricted to times or seasons; to an early or a late repentance: we know not but in that little interval their peace was made, their pardon granted, through the atoning blood, and powerful intercession of their Redeemer. Nor should we too scrupulously pry into the state of others, never, indeed, except to benefit them or ourselves; we should rather imitate the example of Christ, who at once gave an admirable lesson of meekness and charitable judgment, when avoiding an answer which might have led to fruitless discussion, he gave a reproof under the shape of an exhortation. In reply to the inquiry, Are there few that be saved,' he thus checked vain curiosity-'Strive (you) to enter in at the strait gate. On another occasion, in the same spirit, he corrected inqusitiveness, not by an answer, but by an interrogation and a precept What is that to thee? Follow thou me.' But where there is strong ground to apprehend that the contrary may have been the case, it is very dangerous to pronounce peremptorily on the safety of the dead. Because if we allow ourselves to be fully persuaded that they are entered upon a state of happiness, it will naturally and fatally tempt us to lower our own standard. If we are ready to conclude that they are now in a state of glory whose principles we believed to be incorrect, whose practice, to say the least of it, we know to have been negligent, who, without our indulging a censorious or a presumptuous spirit, we thought lived in a state of mind, and a course of habits, not only far from right, but even avowedly inferior to our own; will not this lead to the conclusion, either that we ourselves, standing on so much higher ground, are in a very advanced state of grace, or that a much lower than ours may be a state of safety? And will not such a belief tend to slacken our endeavours, and to lower our tone, both of faith and practice? By this conclusion we contradict the affect ing assertion of a very sublime poet, For us they sicken and for us they die. Another distressing circumstance frequently occurs. We meet with affectionate but irreligious parents, who though kind and perhaps amiable, have neither lived themselves, nor edu cated their families in Christian principles, nor in habits of Christian piety. A child at the age of maturity dies. Deep is the affliction of the doting parent. The world is a blank. He looks round for comfort where he has been accustomed to look for it among his friends. He finds it not. He looks up for it where he has not been accustomed to seek it. Neither his heart nor his treasure has been laid up in heaven. Yet a paroxysm, of what may be termed natural devotion, gives to his grief an air of piety. The first cry of anguish is commonly religious. The lamented object perhaps, through utter ignorance of the awful gulf which was opening to receive him, added to a tranquil temper, might have expired without evincing any great distress, and his happy death is industriously proclaimed through the neighbourhood, and the mourning parents have only to wish that their latter end may be like his. They cheat at once their sorrow and their souls, with the soothing notion that they shall soon meet their beloved child in Heaven. Of this they persuade themselves as firmly and as fondly, as if both they and the object of their grief had been living in the way which leads thither. Oh, for that unbought treasure, a sincere, a real friend, who might lay hold on the propitious moment! When the heart is softened by sorrow, it might possibly, if ever, be led to its true remedy. This would indeed be a more unequivocal, because more painful act of friendship than pouring in the lulling opiate of false consolation, which we are too ready to administer, because it saves our own feelings, while it sooths, without healing, those of the mourner. But perhaps the integrity of the friend conquers his timidity. Alas! he is honestly explicit to unattending or to offended ears. They refuse to hear the voice of the charmer. But if the mourners will not endure the voice of exhortation now, while there is hope, how will they endure the sound of the last trumpet when hope is at an end? If they will not bear the gentle whisper of friendship, how will they bear the voice of the accusing angel, the terrible sentence of the incensed Judge? If private reproof be intolerable, how will they stand the being made a spectacle to angels and to men, even to the whole assembled universe, to the whole creation of God? For while we are thus taking and giving false comfort, our friend as to us will have died in vain. Instead of his death having operated as a warning voice, to rouse us to a more animated But instead of converting the friendly warnpiety, it will be rather likely to lull us into a ing to their eternal benefit, they are probably dangerous security. If our affection has so wholly bent on their own vindication. Still their blinded our judgment, we shall by a false can-character is dearer to them than their soul. dour to another, sink into a false peace ourselves. We never,' say they, were any man's enemy.' It will be a wounding circumstance to the Yes-you have been the enemy of all to whom feelings of surviving friendship, to see a person you have given a bad example. You have espeof loose habits, whom though we love, yet we cially been the enemy to your children in whom VOL. I. 3Q ་ in heart shall see God,' let us remember that this purity is not to be contracted after we have been admitted to its remuneration. The beatitude is pledged as a reward for the purity, not as a qualification for it. Purity will be sublimated in heaven, but will not begin to be produced there. It is to be acquired by passing through the refiner's fire here, not through the penal and expiatory fire which human ingenuity you have implanted no christian principles. I will there serve him in perfection. If the pure Still they insist with the prophet that there is no iniquity in them that can be called iniquity.' "We have wronged no one,' say they, we have given to every one his due. We have done our duty.' Your first duty was to God. You have robbed your Maker of the service due to Him. You have robbed your Redeemer of the souls he died to save. You have robbed your own soul and too probably the souls of those whom you have so wretchedly educated, of eternal hap-devised to purge offending man piness. Thus the flashes of religion which darted in upon their conscience in the first burst of sorrow, too frequently die away; they expire before the grief which kindled them. They resort again to their old resource, the world, which if it cannot soon heal their sorrow, at least soon diverts it. To shut our eyes upon death as an object of terror or of hope, and to consider it only as a release or an extinction, is viewing it under a character which is not its own. But to get rid of the idea at any rate, and then boast that we do not fear the thing we do not think of is not difficult. Nor is it difficult to think of it without alarm if we do not include its consequences. But to him who frequently repeats, not mechanically, but devoutly, we know that THOU shalt come to be our Judge,' death cannot be a matter of indifference. From the foul deeds done in his days of nature. The extricated spirit will be separated from the feculence of all that belongs to sin, to sense, to self. We shall indeed find ourselves new, because spiritualized beings; but if the cast of the mind were not in a great measure the same, how should we retain our identity? The soul will there become that which it here desired to be, that which it mourned because it was so far from being. It will have obtained that complete victory over its corruptions which it here only desired, which it here only struggled to obtain. Here our love of spiritual things is superinduced, there it will be our natural frame. The impression of God on our hearts will be stamped deeper, but it will not be a different impression. Our obedience will be more voluntary, because there will be no rival propensities to obstruct it. Another cause of these happy deaths is that It will be more entire, because it will have to many think salvation a slight thing, that heaven struggle with no counteracting force.-Here we is cheaply obtained, that a merciful God is easily sincerely though imperfectly love the law of pleased, that we are Christians, and that mercy God, even though it controuls our perverse will, comes of course to those who have always pro- though it contradicts our corruptions. There fessed to believe that Christ died to purchase it our love will be complete, because our will will for them. This notion of God being more mer-retain no perverseness, and our corruptions will ciful than he has any where declared himself to be done away. be, instead of inspiring them with more grati- Repentance, precious at all seasons, in the tude to him, inspires more confidence in them-season of health is noble. It is a generous prinselves. This corrupt faith generates a corrupt ciple when it overtakes us surrounded with the morality. It leads to this strange consequence, prosperities of life, when it is not put off till disnot to make them love God better, but to ven- tress drives us to it. Seriousness of spirit is ture on offending him more. most acceptable to God when danger is out of sight, preparations for death when death appears to be at a distance. People talk as if the act of death made a complete change in the nature, as well as in the condition of man. Death is the vehicle to another state of being, but possesses no power to qualify us for that state. In conveying us to a new world it does not give us a new heart. It puts the unalterable stamp of decision on the character, but does not transform it into a cha. racter diametrically opposite. Virtue and piety are founded on the nature of things, on the laws of God, not on any vicissitudes in human circumstances. Irreligion, folly, and vice, are just as unreasonable in the meridian of life as at the approach of death. They strike us differently but they always retain their own character. Every argument Our affections themselves will be rather raised against an irreligious death is equally cogent than altered. Their tendencies will be the same, against an irreligious life. Piety and penitence though their advancement will be incomparably may be quickened by the near view of death, higher. They will be exalted in their degree, but the reasons for practising them are not but not changed in their nature. They will be founded on its nearness. Death may stimulate purified from all earthly mixtures, cleansed from our fears for the consequences of vice, but farall human pollutions, the principle will be clear-nishes no motive for avoiding it, which Chrised from its imperfections, but it will not become another principle. He that is unholy will not be made holy by death. The heart will not have a new object to seek, but will be directed more intensely to the same object. They who love God here will love him far more in heaven, because they will know him far better. There he will reign without a competitor. They who served him here in sincerity tianity had not taught before. The necessity of religion is as urgent now as it will be when we are dying. It may not appear so, but the reality of a thing does not depend on appearances. Besides, if the necessity of being religious depended on the approach of death, what moment of our lives is there, in which we have any security against it? In every point of view, therefore, the same necessity for being religious subsists when we are in full health as when we are about to die. We may then fairly arrive at this conclusion, that there is no happy death but that which conducts to a happy immortality:-No joy in put. ting off the body, if we have not put on the Lord Jesus Christ;--No consolation in escaping from the miseries of time, till we have obtained a well grounded hope of a blessed eternity. CHAP. XX. On the Sufferings of Good Men. AFFLICTION is the school in which great virtues are acquired, in which great characters are formed. It is a kind of moral Gymnasium, in which the disciples of Christ are trained to robust exercise, hardy exertion, and severe conflict. We do not hear of martial heroes in the calm blindness would seldom fail to choose amiss. It is an unspeakable blessing that no events and piping time of peace,' nor of the most emi- are left to the choice of beings, who from their nent saints in the quiet and unmolested periods Were circumstances at our own disposal we of ecclesiastical history. We are far from deny-should allot ourselves nothing but ease and sucing that the principle of courage in the warrior, or of piety in the saint continues to subsist, ready to be brought into action when perils beset the country or trials assail the church; but it must be allowed that in long periods of inaction, both are liable to decay. The Christian, in our comparatively tranquil day, is happily exempt from the trials and the terrors which the annals of persecution record. Thanks to the establishment of a pure Christianity in the church, thanks to the infusion of the same pure principle into our laws, and to the mild and tolerating spirit of both-a man is so far from being liable to pains and penalties for his attachment to his religion, that he is protected in its exercise; and were certain existing statutes enforced, he would even incur penalties for his violation of religious duties, rather than for his observance of them.* cess, but riches and fame, but protracted youth, perpetual health, unvaried happiness. All this as it would not be very unnatural, so perhaps it would not be very wrong, for beings who were always to live on earth. But for beings who are placed here in a state of trial and not established in their final home, whose condition in eternity depends on the use they make of time, nothing would be more dangerous than such a power, nothing more fatal than the consequences to which such a power would lead. If a surgeon were to put in the hand of a wounded patient the probe or the lancet, with self! How skin-deep would be the examination, how slight the incision! The patient would escape the pain, but the wound might prove mortal. The practitioner therefore wisely uses his instruments himself. He goes deep perhaps, but not deeper than the case demands. The pain may be acute but the life is preserved. how much false tenderness would he treat him Thus HE in whose hands we are, is too good, and loves us too well to trust us with ourselves. He knows that we will not contradict our own inclinations, that we will not impose on ourselves any thing unpleasant, that we will not inflict on ourselves any voluntary pain, however necessary graciously does this for us himself, or he knows the infliction, however salutary the effect. God it would never be done. Yet still the Christian is not exempt from his individual, his appropriate, his undefined trials. We refer not merely to those cruel mockings,' which the acute sensibility of the apostle led him to rank in the same catalogue with bonds, imprisonments, exile and martyrdom itself. We allude not altogether to those misrepresentations and calumnies to which the zealous Christian is peculiarly liable; nor exclusively to those difficulties to which his very adherence to the principles he professes, must necessarily subject him; nor entirely to those occasional sacrifices of credit, of advancement, of popular applause, to which his refusing to sail with the tide of sufferings with other men: he has no where popular opinion may compel him; nor solely to any promise of immunity from the troubles of the disadvantages which under certain circum-life, but he has a merciful promise of support stances his not preferring expediency to principle may expose him. But the truly good man is not only often called to struggle with trials of large dimensions, with exigencies of obvious difficulty, but to encounter others which are better understood than defined. A Christian is liable to the same sorrows and under them. He considers them in another view, he bears them with another spirit, he improves them to other purposes than those whose views are bounded by this world. Whatever may be the instruments of his sufferings, whether sickness, losses, calumnies, persecutions, he knows that it proceeds from God; all means are *We allude to the laws against swearing, attending HIS instruments. All inferior causes operate by public worship, &c. HIS directing hand. |