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BY REV. SAMUEL T. SPEAR, D.D.,

PASTOR OF THE SOUTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF BROOKLYN, N. Y.

MAN MORTAL AND TRANSIENT.

"FOR dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."-GEN. 3: 19.

"FOR what is your life? It is even a vapor, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away."-JAMES 4: 14.

MEETING you upon this the first Sabbath of the new year, and yielding to the suggestions of the hour, I have chosen the above Scriptures, as an appropriate basis for our present meditation. The first of these passages you will at once recognize as the language of God, pronouncing the decree of mortality upon our first parents, and through them upon the race. The second is the language of the same God, drawing a picture of the fleeting character of our present life. Both are suited to impress and profit a meditative mind. In each we find a fact which it is not the part of wisdom to ignore or forget. The theme of man as mortal and transient is, I am aware, quite familiar to your thoughts; the Christian pulpit is often reminding you of the truth on this sub

ject; your daily observation enforces and illustrates that truth; look where you will, it meets you with its solemn admonition; and perhaps one reason why we bestow so little reflection upon what is so obvious, may be found in the manifest, the palpable, and undeniable character of the facts themselves. Let us, if possible, dismiss this apathy, and arouse our thoughts to that twofold view of human life, presented in the words chosen for a text. I begin the meditation,

I. In the first place, with the divine decree of mortality.

Our first parents, created in the image of God, and with moral natures pure in their tendencies, became trespassers under the law of Eden, involving themselves and their posterity in the condition and calamities of sin. With them began the dark and terrible problem of sin in the history of man. Falling from their "first estate," they lost the moral harmony of their original being, and were justly exposed to the curse of offended Heaven. Uttering the great germinal prophecy of redemption, in the promised seed of the woman, which it was reserved for the future to develop and complete, God also pronounced his curse upon man. "And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, say ing, Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake: in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life: thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field: in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken; for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

What would have been the divine disposition of human beings but for the catastrophe of sin-whether they would have been translated as were Enoch and Elijah, or have been made immortal on earth?―these are questions in regard to which revelation gives us no light. We know, that "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin." We know, too, that the sentence of death hath "passed upon all men, for that all have sinned." Nothing is clearer than that the Bible connects mortality with sin, making it one of the consequences of sin. If in the pre-Adamic state of the world referred to by geologists, animals lived and died, it still remains true, that mortality in respect to man is a special appointment or order of nature connected with, and founded upon, the fact of his sinfulness. So the Bible teaches, and so we believe.

This mortality, whether of the individual or the race, is hence no accident in the providential government of God. "Seeing his days are determined," says Job, "the number of his months are with thee, thou hast appointed his bounds that he can not pass." "It is appointed unto men once to die." God is the author of the appointment. Our mortality is the fixed and unchang

ing law of his providence. He might have made us immortal on earth-so firm and undecaying in the structure of our bodies that no cause could peril the springs of vitality; he might have assigned to each member of the race even more than patriarchal longevity; yet, in the circumstances arising out of sin, he has otherwise decreed. Hence we die. Death as a law of nature, is such only because it is the will of God. Death is his minister; and when it comes, and wherever it comes, there God appears in the exercise of his power, being as distinctly seen in the event of death as he is in the laws and processes of life.

Moreover, the time, the place, the circumstances, and the causes, in the case of each individual, are as much settled and determined in the mind of God as the general appointment itself. Though unknown to us, they are not unknown to him. In the scheme of providence there is to every man a dying moment; and when that moment comes, he will certainly die. If by disease, it will be such as no medicine can cure; if by accident, it will be such as no human foresight can evade; if by the gradual decay of years, it will be an exhaustion from which no power can recover the victim. The causes which to us seem contingent, and often irregular, with God belong to the mechanism of an infallible law, and do their work without a single instance of failure. No human skill can dodge them, and no human power disarm their fatal force. Death is their errand, and the victim on whom they fall, must die. If this be fate, so be it. It is that kind of fate which results from the sovereign and irreversible appointments of that God in whom we live, and move, and have our being. He holds our life in his own hands; and where he sets down the mark, there we pause. Let us not glory in our strength, or boast of our youth. Let us rather remember, that God is the keeper of our lives from year to year, measuring their periods by a counsel alike infallible and good. If the Lord will, and not otherwise, we shall live, and do this or that.

Observe also the fact, that death, though an event perfectly certain, ordinarily baffles all our calculations as to its time. We have no means of knowing beforehand on whom, or when, or where it will fall. No age or condition is exempt. No man penetrates his own future. No one is able to say, that the year or the day upon which he has just entered, may not be his last. No one embarks in any plan or pursuit of life with the certain knowledge that he will live to complete it. He who leaves his family in the morning, has no positive assurance that he will return in the evening. He may find death in the counting-room, or in the street; yea, he may find it any where. Often when men least expect it, and are perhaps least prepared for it, the event is nearest. To the race God says, "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return;" to the individual he publishes the same decree; and yet, for wise

reasons, he conceals from all the mortal hour till it comes, so conducting his providence in the administration of death, as on the one hand to rebuke the spirit of presumption, and on the other to teach our constant dependence upon his preserving power.

But what is death? What is that event of which we have been thus speaking in these general terms? Perfectly to know what it is, and all it is, is the privilege of those only who have died. Our knowledge while living is simply that of observation, and never that of personal experience. What, then, is death as we observe it? You may take a case not unfamiliar to human eyes. There lies, attired and coffined for the grave, a victim of the great destroyer; one of the dearest objects of your earthly love has just fallen; the struggle is over; and your child, or parent, or husband, or wife is dead. For a series of years your conversations, communions of thought, bestowments of affection, mutual care and service, held the rank of merely common-place events, so much like themselves, and withal so frequent, as to have attracted no special notice. But alas! what a wonderful change has just happened. To the living how strange and afflictive, and to the dead how august and amazing! You have done all that you could to avert the fatal blow; you have not only invoked the skill of man, but also sought the help of God; and yet, in spite of all your efforts, disease has done its deadly work. Life's mysterious and noble mechanism has come to a final pause. What is this? You answer: My cherished friend, my child, my father or mother or husband or wife is dead. Yes; but there lies the once living form. I see every feature of a countenance that but yesterday beamed with the expressions of intelligence. You observe the same, and yet you can not speak to that deceased friend; you can no longer exchange thoughts with him; your strongest sympathies awaken no response on his part; you are absolutely shut out, and that, too, forever in this world, from one that has been as familiar to you as your breath. Strange event! Though a single word is its name, it is an aggregate of the most heart-searching solemnities. How vivid our thoughts become at such an hour! Can it be? Is it so? How is it? What is it? Am I not mistaken? Is not this my own dream? Oh! is it possible that the relation between me and my friend is so changed, that it has in a moment become so stupendously different? Must I ever think of him as the inhabitant of another, and to me a mysterious world? Let me try to follow his departing spirit. How did it go? Where? How far? What has become of it? What is it doing at this mo ment? Shall I never meet that friend again? Will he never know me more? What shall I do with this body, cold, lifeless, motionless? Must I commit it to the tomb, leaving it in that lonely solitude with the earth-worm for its only companion?

Such, my friends, is death in its relation to human feeling. The

sentence of mortality in its fulfillment, while it blasts the dying, addresses the hearts of the living with an amazing power. We surely want some plan of thought, some data of hope, with which to expound an event that so terribly rends the relations of this life, and drives inquiry with such vehement earnestness into the untried future.

It is estimated, that not less than two hundred thousand millions of human beings have lived and died, since our system began. The sweep of mortality is so great, that, upon an average, there have been about thirty-four millions of deaths in every year, or about three thousand seven hundred and sixty in every hour, or sixty-two in every minute, or more than one in every second of time. Were the entire dying of the globe transferred to this city, a single day would be sufficient to place every man, woman, and child in eternity; and in some five days the same would be true of the great metropolis of the nation. By the same process it would take only about eight months to transmit the whole population of these United States to the world of spirits. Not less than two hundred millions of mourners are the annual witnesses of what

death is doing in our world. Recall the scene in which you exchanged the last farewell with your expiring friend, multiplying it millions of times; and you will but state the stern experience of your race in a single year. We are so accustomed to mortality as the appointed lot of our species, and withal so strangely insensible, that we need occasionally the shock of severe meditation upon the sentence: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." These bodies that we adorn and pamper with so much care, will soon be the food of worms, in a few years undistinguished from common dust.

What a rebuke mortality gives to all the pride, and pomp, and earthly circumstance of life! How vain, empty, and in the end worthless that life, whose hopes and prospects lie within the narrow limits of time! If this be all of which one thinks, and for which he lives, existence is alike a farce and a failure. Mr. Webster never gave forth a truer utterance than when he said: "One may live as a conqueror, a king, or a magistrate; but he must die as a man. The bed of death brings every human being to his pure individuality; to the intense contemplation of that deepest and most solemn of all relations, the relation between the creature and his Creator. Here it is that fame and renown can not assist us; that all external things must fail to aid us; that even friends, affection, human love and devotedness can not succor us.' True, every word of it! Solemnly true!

"When down thy vale, unlocked by midnight thought,
That loves to wander in thy sunless realms,

O Death! I stretch my view; what visions rise!
What triumphs! toils imperial! arts divine!

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