says the Word of God. "Remember," echoes the responding voice of reason. Remember we shall, and remember we must, never forgetting the scenes of our earthly lifetime, or losing sight of its moral aspect; carrying along with us, from the day of our death to the remotest age of the eternal future, a clear and legible record of our own being. The thought is one of great sublimity. It enters essentially into the glory of our future life. We have no occasion to regret its truth, and surely we ought not so to live as to be afraid of such a truth.

IV. What, then, as a final inquiry, is to be impression of memory upon our HAPPINESS or MISERY in the future world? That so great a power will make an impression upon the soul, pleasant or painful, according to the character of the facts embraced in the exercise, is an inference derivable not only from the greatness of the power, but equally from the ample materials of our present experience. Let us ponder a moment upon this experience, especially in those aspects which involve the question of moral character.

Those who in their conduct towards God and man have been governed by the principle of virtue, ordinarily enjoy the rich blessing of very pleasant memories. Having lived well for themselves and the world, having acted virtuously in the successive stages and various relations of life, whenever they review the scene, they see much upon which it is agreeable to reflect. They have not wasted their powers in idleness, or perverted them by unlawful uses. To their families they have been of great service. What they could do, they have cheerfully done to relieve the sorrows of others, and promote the general interests of human society; and especially have they sought to discharge their duties to God, adoring him, loving him, trusting him, and accepting the salvation which his grace has provided for a guilty world. Lives thus enriched by virtue, thus expressed in the activities of be nevolence, and thus marked by piety towards God, lay a broad foundation for happy reminiscence. As one enters the vale of years, and approaches that period when his powers of action fail, when his interest in the outward excitements of earth becomes feeble, and when too his accumulating infirmities loudly suggest that his days are drawing to a close, it is, it must be a great luxury then in thought to revert to the scenes and circumstances of a well-spent life. So Paul felt when the hour of his departure was at hand. What a cheerful radiance gathered from such a life, falls upon the past! What secret memories linger about the sepulcher of departed years! What inspiring hopes dissipate the shadows that overhang the future! Memory has a blessing for the truly good man. Adversity may come; disease may come; pain may make its home in his mortal body; death may mark him for a victim; yet his life, bearing the broad stamp

of virtue, and furnishing the condition of hope through Jesus Christ, is inseparable from himself, incapable of being lost, and hence a legacy of pleasant reflection when every earthly good is fading away. The toils, and trials, and difficulties to be encountered in living well, the temptations and the self-denials practiced, the total battle of virtue in her heroic struggle to be or to do, her sympathies with the suffering, her charity to the needy, her warning to the wicked, her faith in Jesus, her zeal for his cause, her oft-repeated prayer to the God of grace-all these varying phases of earthly goodness, whenever revisited in thought, invoke the smile of conscience, and by the appointment of God, connect themselves with a sequel of virtuous peace.

Just the opposite experience, even on earth, will sooner or later flow from a life distinguished by opposite qualities. Fix your eye upon that man who has pursued the way of sin, scorning every principle of piety, and laughing at all the sanctions of immortality he has never drawn a single breath of genuine prayer, or done a single thing to please the God of his being. Pure, simple, unmodified, and appalling sinfulness has been, and still is, the only character which he has lived to acquire; thus he has spent his days on earth; and now, perhaps, in the closing hours of life, comes a period of meditation and review. His own memory has taken him in hand. That memory drags up the sheeted ghosts of long-buried sins. He looks at them, recognizes them, and pronounces them his own. His whole nature is pressed with portentous rumors from the past; the testimony of his memory he can not question; the voice of conscience he can not decline to hear; and do you wonder that such a man, conversing with such a past, is filled, as he now seems to be, with the piercing agony of self-reproach? There is, perhaps, no scene more dreadful than that furnished by the spirit of a man, when fully aroused under the self-inflicted visitation of retrospective and condemnatory thought. In such a crisis happiness is at an end, and misery becomes the dominant and all-pervading experience of the soul.

"Sometimes the universal air

Seems lit with ghastly flame;

Ten thousand, thousand dreadful eyes
Are looking down in blame."

Facts, to almost any extent, some of them of the most startling character, are ready to testify to the truth of this picture. The disquietude, bitterness, and despair felt by every sinner in the hour of his conviction, his dissatisfaction with himself, his fears for the future, his universal wretchedness of feeling, grow out of the elements of his own life, as rehearsed to him by the faithful voice of memory. A gentleman who had filled a high position in society, having for several years been a member of the

American Congress, in a sickness which he supposed to be his last, said to a friend: "Now that I see myself as I really am, and as I have been, my whole life looks to me like one long, dark, black line. I am to myself the most afflicting object of which I can think." Memory spake; and the bitter wail of woe was the echo that came up from the spirit of the statesman and the sinner. What was it that so terribly haunted that man of prostituted genius, the unhappy Voltaire, during the last hours of his life? What unnerved the spirit and prostrated the courage of this distinguished hero of infidelity? What caused him to exclaim, "I am abandoned by God and man?" What led him to solicit an interview with a Catholic priest, and actually draw up with his own hand a written recantation of the principles he had professed? The simple truth is, Voltaire, on his death-bed, seeing Voltaire in the career of his past life, was as much displeased as he was distressed with the sight. He could not, without dismay, endure the spectacle of his own existence. What, again, was it that created such intense anguish in the soul of Francis Newport, when the hour of his departure was at hand? An infidel in sentiment, and a profligate in morals, he at length reached the point where the return of thought to the life he had lived crushed his spirit with the greatness of its own agony. Looking towards the fire, the wretched man exclaimed: "Oh! that I was to lie and broil upon that fire for a hundred thousand years, to purchase the favor of God, and be reconciled to him. again! But it is a fruitless, vain wish; millions of years will bring me no nearer to the end of my tortures than one poor hour. O eternity! eternity! Who can properly paraphrase upon the words, forever and ever?" Memory, true to her trust, sure in her action, and clear in her statement, looked into the past, and there gathered these elements of horror, and placed them in the bosom. of this unhappy man. It was memory that kindled such a flame of self-inflicted wrath in the soul of the wretched Altamont, compelling him to exclaim: "O time! time! it is fit thou shouldst thus strike thy murderer to the heart. How art thou fled forever! A month!-oh! for a single week! I ask not for years, though an age were too little for the much I have to do." Hear him at a later moment of the dreadful struggle: "Remorse for the past throws my thoughts on the future; worse dread of the future strikes them back on the past. I turn, and turn, and find no ray. Didst thou feel half the mountain that is on me, thou wouldst struggle with the martyr for his stake, and bless heaven for the flames." These words need no comment. "The spirit of a man will sustain his infirmity; but a wounded spirit who can bear?" The lines of Lord Byron, the poet and the sinner, penning and publishing the retrospective griefs of his own spirit, seem pertinent to this entire class of cases:

"My days are in the yellow leaf;

The flowers, the fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief

Are mine alone.

The fire that on my bosom preys

Is lone as some volcanic isle;

No torch is lighted at its blaze-
A funeral pile."

Here then we take our stand, not upon a doubtful speculation, but a positive and well-attested fact of experience, that memory does sustain a most vital and intimate connection with the question of happiness or misery, acting in the one direction or the other according to the character of the report which it brings up from the past. Hence we speak of pleasant memories and painful memories, designating facts with which every one is acquainted. What then is the general conclusion of at least a very suggestive analogy in respect to the impression to be made by this same faculty after death? Unless all the laws that govern reasoning here, are to be reversed hereafter, it can not be true that persons who, in the moral elements of life, stand at opposite poles, and who in this condition pass into the world of spirits, will and must, by the force of causes inherent in their own being, be as widely divergent when they awake in eternity. It would seem impossible, without a total change in their mental natures, to identify them in one destiny, or unite them in one common class of experiences. In moral estimation they are radically opposed to each other; they present an essential difference in the manner of their respective lives; and hence, judging of the impression of memory in eternity by what experience teaches here in like circumstances, we come to the conclusion fairly, naturally, almost necessarily, that happiness will be the result in the one case, and misery the result in the other. Where the facts to be remembered are so widely unlike, the effect of the review must be correspondingly different.

In respect then to the dead who die in the Lord, the Bible assures us that they are blessed, not only in the fact that they rest from their labors, but also in the further fact that their works do follow them. These works, being alike the evidence and the elements of their spiritual character on earth, pass with them into eternity as the realities of their moral state; and in view of them, judging the good by them according to the rule of grace in Christ Jesus, God deems it fitting to give them the rich rewards of heaven. Is it then unreasonable to suppose, that the memory of these sainted ones whom God approves, will gather from the scenes of time at least some of the themes of celestial joy? In time they were prepared for heaven; in time they fought the battle of piety, and by the grace of God laid the foundation for eternal glory; in time they were greeted with the plan of re

demption, and in time this plan came home to their spirits as the power of God unto salvation; in time they were led by a kind and merciful providence, their wants supplied, their faith disciplined, and their hopes confirmed; and, hence, as Christians, they could hardly understand themselves in the skies without recurrence to these antecedents of preparation for and progress towards their heavenly home. There is such an intimate connection between the facts earthly and the facts heavenly, that the thought of the latter can never be complete without the thought of the former. As we now look forward with joy and hope to what is to be, so we shall hereafter look backward with joy and gratitude to what has been, recounting to ourselves, perhaps publishing to others, the record of goodness and grace, piety and love, which began in the morning of our existence only to culminate in an eternal noon. Seeing this life as it was, thinking of it in that to which it has led, and beholding it in the clearer light of celestial knowledge, the good will carry it with them down the path of eternal ages, as the first chapter of that wonderful history which their memories will be forever writing, though never able to finish.

From this pleasant and hopeful view, so gratifying to thought and inspiring to the Christian pilgrim, we turn with a feeling of sadness to its melancholy contrast. What shall we say of memory in the experience of those whom God's decree for life's misdeeds has consigned to penal woe? In whatever this woe may consist, whether in the natural effects of sin, or in special inflictions, or in both combined, it is, in relation to the consciousness of the subject and the sufferer, an experience, something which he feels, and the reasons of which he can not but know. Memory forever keeping up the connection of thought between what he is and what he was, always impressing him with the living sense of identity in both worlds, will not fail to tell him why he is a fugitive from the realms of peace. And if the same laws of impression, the same responsiveness of feeling to the power of facts that exist here, shall continue to exist hereafter, then the memories of a lost soul must form a most doleful catalogue of visions had and experiences felt. I shall not attempt to draw the picture; I have no desire to speak in terms of extravagance or severity; yet I can not but think that it will be a dreadful thing to remember in hell. What is there in a life that breaks the law of duty, incurs the frown of Heaven, and ruins the soul, of which one can ever think with pleasure? Regret in its most pungent form, a consciousness of selfruin without mitigation or excuse, a vision of divine authority resisted and mercies perverted, a clear and penetrating sense of selfcondemnation, a distinct and self-pronouncing apprehension of the justice of God-these elements of mental experience, associating themselves with the exercise of memory, and deriving their chief