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session of the heart. It is like that enchanter's touch which turned every thing to gold. We all know the magic influence of some newly acquired bliss to embellish every thing around us. How it changes the scene, and changes the actors, and changes the most common incidents and occupations, by the "couleur de rose" it spreads over them. This is but a faint resemblance of the sober, calm, abiding tinge of heavenly blessedness, that shines on everything in the Christian's way. Would we could say effectually to the hearts of all men, "Taste and see."

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CHAPTER VIII.

IN HIS DEATH.

"If we be dead with Christ, we shall also live with him."-Rom. vi. 8.

IT is commonly said, that man is born to die: yet this was never true but once. The children of Adam are born indeed, since their first father's fall, in a condition in which they must die, or perhaps we should say better, are to die; for of the necessity we know nothing; the translation of Enoch and Elijah are unexplained; as also that future transmutation of which St. Paul speaks-"We shall not all die, but we shall all be changed." The sons of Adam, then, are to die but this was no pur

pose of their first creation. Life, not death, was the gift that God bestowed upon his creatures, when He placed them in what we now so justly call a passing, perishing world. "Death," natural and spiritual death, “ hath passed upon all men, for that all have sinned;" but unless we are to say that man was designed for sin, we cannot say that he was designed for death. It tends to no conclusion, that science finds in every new-born child the symptoms of fore-doomed decay; that the anatomist perceives the nice machinery of the human frame is not calculated to work on unimpaired for ever. The same sentence that called thorns and thistles from the soil accursed, called disease and decay into the dust-consigned body;the same concussion that altered the whole arrangements of the natural world, smote the machinery of the human frame. And who can say how it altered it? how instantly it became unfit for its original purpose, incapable of its first destination, and unmeet to serve the spirit that animated it, as that spirit itself be

term man,

came to serve its Maker? Whether the likeness of God, in which He created man, was a corporeal as well as a moral similitude, revelation does not intimate. By analogy we might be led to suppose it; and the rather that the "Let us make man in our own likeness," designates the compound being, soul and body, and neither distinctively. On the other hand, form is adverse to our ideas of Deity, and when the moral image begins to be retraced upon the soul, no change takes place in the body; that impartition of the Spirit which renews the mind, makes no impression on the corporeal frame; while of the renewal of the body at the resurrection, no more is predicated, than that it shall be like his glorious body who is man as well as God.

It does not signify-in Adam all died: the soul at once, by the loss of God's vivifying Spirit-the body by slow, but not postponed disease: for I believe it is philosophically said, that man begins to die at the moment of his entrance into life, being never purely healthful.

So also in Christ all must be made alive; the soul in gradual sanctification by the renewing of the Holy Ghost, perfected at the moment of departure hence--the body at once, when the trumpets shall sound and the dead shall be raised. That dissolution of the union between them, which makes of the one an unclothed spirit, of the other a sodden clay, we distinctively call death; but that is not in Scripture the primitive or the principal meaning of the term, nor its most frequent application. We talk very loosely of such things, and if it were only talk it would not signify. But I think our ideas also may be too vague, too unexamined, and too little weighed. We call the soul immortal, and the body mortal-terms sufficiently accurate for common parlance, wherein they mean no more than that at our dissolution the spirit retains its conscious being in happiness or woe, while the body for a time becomes insensible of existence. We have received this impression from Scripture-perhaps from nature-certainly from tradition

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