an event, was only a gradual decline and extinction of the powers of life. This is all which we saw, or could know, as necessarily belonging to this crisis in the progress of our being. And yet, from this ignorance, we allow ourselves to be troubled by the phantoms of agitating conjecture. We imagine, and indeed it is common to say, that because " no one has returned to tell us what it is to die," there must be some mysterious and peculiar sensation, some awful physical experience attending it. But we see nothing, we see indications of nothing, and we ought not to presume any thing of this nature.

Neither are we to presume that death arouses the mind, in the last moments of its earthly existence, to the keenest attention, or to the most intense action of its powers. The subject, when distinctly contemplated beforehand, may do so; it may often do so in the midst of life; and well were it, if it far more frequently aroused us to do in season the work of life. All we wish to say is,-and we wish

to say it to preclude all appeals at once to mysterious fear and unfounded hope-that there is no peculiar, no fearful nor hopeful activity of mind amidst the solemnities of dissolution; that, in most cases, there is no activity. It is probable, that the exhausted faculties usually sink to their mortal repose, as they do to nightly sleep; and that the convulsive struggles which are sometimes witnessed, are often as unconscious as those with which we sink to the slumbers of evening rest.

Nor, when the veil of delirium is spread over the mortal hour, can we regard it as the evil that it is often thought to be. It has seemed to us rather, in many cases, as a friendly veil, drawn by the hand of nature over what would otherwise be the agonies of separation, over the anguish that the parent would feel at leaving children orphans and destitute, or that the friend would feel in saying farewell to those who were dearest upon earth. Delirium often interposes, we believe, by the kind providence of God, where nature

would be too weak, or faith too infirm for the trial.

Nor yet is there any thing but fancy in what is sometimes said of the loneliness of the last hour. To the selfish and the bad, and in proportion as they possess this character, there is indeed solitude in death, and it may then be doubly felt. But to them there is solitude also in life; solitude in the chamber of sickness, in the hour of retired meditation, nay, and it is oftentimes deeply felt in the throng of society. If we deserve to have friends, they are with us in death as truly as in life; so long as we are conscious of any thing earthly, we are conscious of their presence. It may sustain and soothe us, till the last moment of our stay on earth. "I walked with her," said one who laid down the remains of a beloved companion in a distant land-"I walked with her down the valley of shadows; I wiped the cold damps of death from her forehead; and saw her ascend to the mansions of the blessed!"

But we must hasten briefly to consider some of the errors that relate, not to the circumstances, but to the nature, the essential character of this solemn event.

When our Savior says, "He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die," he adds, "believest thou this?" The question might still be put to multitudes even in a Christian land, and, we doubt not, with the strongest implication of their unbelief. They do not believe it. Death is regarded as the extinction, rather than as the continuance of being. Whatever the words of our theology may say, the real impression upon most minds is, that death sunders almost all the ties that united us to our former existence; that it changes not only our state, but our nature; that the soul, as it travels to the "undiscovered country," is passing beyond the borders of all that it has known, and sought, and valued. We are apt to feel as if on the passage from life we parted with all that our thoughts had familiarized and our affections cherished. But is not this

an error? We take with us-so to speak -our thinking and conscious selves; and it is no vanity, but a simple truth, to say, in a very important sense, that ourself is our all; for it embraces all our mental acquisitions and attachments, our joys and hopes, our attainments of piety, our treasures of knowledge, all elevated and holy contemplations that we may have indulged in, all our habits of thought and feeling that are estimable and pure, all that is precious in happiness, all that is sacred in memory; and the record of all this death will not erase, but will only impress upon it the seal of perpetuity. It has not erased these things, we may believe, from the venerated and pious minds that have gone before us. The dead,the departed, should we rather say,-are connected with us by more than the ties of memory. The love that on earth yearned towards us is not dead; the kindness that gladdened us is not dead; the sympathy that bound itself with our fortunes is not dead, nor has it lost its