sight to a believing mind. The world's proud hero, dying amid the shouts of recent victory, with an appeal to posterity to record his deeds, and to fame to secure him immortality; but unmindful of a record already made in heaven, and an immortality prepared perhaps elsewhere: or the patient sufferer, arrested by sickness in the prime of life, yielding with mournful resignation to a hard necessity; but ignorant of sin, a stranger to Christ, and regardless of that primeval sentence out-standing still against him, never misgiving that death is more to him than the dissolving of his earthly ties, and cutting asunder of his earthly schemes. "Triumphant in death ;” Resigned in death.” O how the believer shudders at those phrases, as they are uttered and repeated through the world with such insensate admiration. Could some one of those celestial beings, who are about our paths doing the errands of the Almighty, awed as they must be by what they hear, interpose, in accents audible, a single word between those perverted epithets-the world

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itself would start aside with horror. "Tri

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umphant in eternal death;" Resigned to eternal death." How intensely terrific! And yet it is so. If there be truth in anything that God has said, it is so. If that Scripture we profess to believe is not a fiction, it is thus with every one who, having sinned after the similitude of Adam, is not renewed by the Holy Spirit into the likeness of Christ Jesus. There is nothing in such deaths as these that can be likened to the Saviour's death. To all He sunk beneath they are indifferent—to all that supported Him they die insensible. "My God, my God! why hast thou forsaken me?" They have a God in Christ to whom they do not cry-they are forsaken and they do not know it-they are dying under the burthen of unexpiated sin, and do not feel it, do not fear it.

But Christ is no longer dead: and he can die no more. And they that are in him are dead no longer. They are alive from the dead,” “ passed from death to life." And

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they can die no more. "If any man keep my

saying, he shall not see death." They are united in eternal vitality with him who has "abolished death, and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel.” It is here, in the redeemed of the Lord, we must look for the remaining features of the Saviour's death. The world and the church have for once divided the likeness. The judicial sentence-the penal agony-the divine abandonment the crush of unforgiven sin-these, the real, the only essential death, are for his enemies— for them who first crucified or now neglect him. "Crucifying to themselves the Son of God afresh." Far other is the resemblance his people are called upon and privileged to exhibit. There is a sense in which the disciple of Christ is required to be conformed to the likeness of his death: which having spoken of at length in the chapter on Afflictions, I shall advert to here but briefly. In his body, aye, and in his soul too, he is susceptible of many a wound, but never a mortal one, from him who is still his enemy-his vanquished, flying

enemy-though no longer his tyrant or his king. He has limbs that can ache, and loved ones that can be taken, and a heart that can be desolated. The Christian spirit is not a bold and lofty daring, that makes light of the consequences of the primeval curse, whatever portion of them may be still upon him. He is as one just recovering from a mortal pestilence. He is no longer in fear of dying, no longer susceptible of the disease, and can walk securely amid the contagion round him. But he still suffers from the past; he is weak and in pain; and must have recourse to many bitter medicaments for the recovery of his strength: small matters in comparison, occasions of gratitude rather than complaint: but still painful remembrancers of danger past, not joyous but grievous while they stay, which he looks forward in hope to be relieved from. As St. Paul speaks, "These light afflictions which are but for a moment;" but still they were afflictions, small remnants of the death that nature loathes, symptoms still lingering in the recovered soul.

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A Christian is not called upon to love them, neither permitted to despise them. My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord." He is not heard to talk about these lingering characters of death with a proud and philosophic bravery: nor give applause to those that do. This is that language of society the believer cannot learn. Death and eternity are to him but one idea, and that idea is either hell or heaven: he cannot talk lightly and fictitiously of either. Jesus never did. Young Christians, who have such a language to unlearn, should do it with watchful care; for although it be our mother tongue, it does not become the adopted family of God. It is not seemly to talk of death as if it were some mysterious change-a mighty casualty leading to unknown results a magician's wand to touch individual being into a half-mortal, half-immortal thing— a half-condemned and half-acquitted victim: as if it were an isolated moment, dependent on a thousand accidents, which it is reasonable to fear though it be the gate of everlasting bliss,