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It is a fact too familiar to be controverted, that the first years of infancy and childhood open ofttimes with the bloom of health and the promise of a vigorous manhood. But by and by the hereditary taint appears. The growth of the body unfolds the lurking malady, and the death wrapped up in a show of life appears. So families, and even tribes, perish from the earth, under the cumulative corruption which the stream of being in that direction bears along. The years of the generations grow less and less. They dwindle to a span, and then to nothing. They fail from the ranks of humanity, and leave only their names and their graves. And the man who should reason from first appearances in the cradle or the nursery against this stern law of human descent, would reason just as soundly as he who should deny the spiritual death included within the too transparent disguises of infantile innocence and beauty. For there are many innate propensities which do not show themselves until the carnal nature unfolds and warms them into conscious existence. The babe shows not the diseased appetite of drunken progenitors, but the surroundings of temptation may stir it up in the man. Nay, it may assert itself with perfect spontaneity, and with no external excitements. There are men of bland and gentle manners in private life, who will say, that on the field of battle, with the measured march of numbers, the martial music, and the presence of a foe, no sight is so lovely as that of falling and bleeding ranks, no work so sweet and genial as that of mur

der. The young of the tiger, it is said, may be domesticated, and for a while made. mild and docile; but the first taste of blood will rouse all his native instincts; and his eye turns to fire, and he bounds in fury to the jungles!

CHAPTER VI.

THE MYSTERY OF DEATH.

"Fair daffodils! we weep to see

You haste away so soon;

As yet the early rising sun

Has not attained its noon.

Stay, stay,

Until the hasting day

Has run,

But to the even-song,

And, having prayed together, we

Will go with you along.

"We have short time to stay as you;

We have as short a spring;

As quick a growth to meet decay

As you or any thing.

We die

As your hours do, and dry

Away,

Like to the summer's rain,

Or like the pearls of morning's dew,

Ne'er to be found again."- HERRICK.

DEATH is described in all languages as a monster and anomaly in the universe. It is the kingly terror, the sum of all the agonies which afflict human nature. Where is the path on which its pale shadow hath not rested? Who does not remember the time when the stern fact of mortality broke in upon the gay fancies of his childhood, as the one giant

sorrow for which there was no consolation.

It

would seem, sometimes, from the prevailing tone of our religious literature, as if the principal office of Christianity were to pour light and consolation over this one province of calamity. One would think, from much of our preaching, that the chief motive to religion was the fright that comes from this haunting spectre, whose approach must be made the dread of all our pleasant places. It is the "last enemy." It is the "cup of trembling." It is the "ultima linea rerum," the dread boundary of joyous existence.

This calamity is peculiar to man. The inferior tribes know nothing of it. They obey the laws of their life, and so they have no dread of what is to come. The lamb gambols alike through the green pastures or to the place of slaughter. Up to the last flutter of her wings, the bird ceases not to trill her matins upon the air. But the only immortal being upon the earth lives in dread of death. The only being to whom death is an impossibility, fears every day that it will come. And if we analyze the nature of this fear, and explore the cause of it, we shall not be at all certain that it will not follow the mere natural man into a future life, and have an important part in its retributions. Man fears death only because he has lost conscious communion with Him in whom alone is immortality. In so far as we preserve our relation to Him who is the soul of our soul and the life of our life, our spirits wear the bloom of everlasting youth, and no more than the joyous

child do we dream of consumption and decay. When this is lost, no matter in what stage of our being, whether in this life or another, we feel our weakness, we seem to lie at the mercy of change, and to hang over the abysses of annihilation.

And how mysterious are the shapes in which the spoiler appears! He comes not like an angel of peace, but seizes his victim as his prey. He comes in a grisly train of diseases and sufferings, the seeds of which the infant brings with him into the world. Yes, the infant that never knew sin has the tender fibres of his frame torn by the destroyer, and the death-agonies are received with the very boon of existence. Womanhood fades away in its beautiful prime, before its swift day has "run to the evensong," and manhood fails amid the heat and burden of the noontide hour, and the impress of suffering is left upon its glorious brow. Not one fourth of the race attain to the period of natural decay. One half, it is computed, die during the periods of infancy and childhood.

Can it be said that a human nature which has all this inheritance of disease, suffering, and mortality, has the soundness of its primal state, and that no taint has fallen upon it? We do not argue that mortality is the effect of sin, nor do we believe that the primitive man would never have died if he had never transgressed. But we do argue that death could never become this monster in the universe, could never make this train of diseases and agonies the grim heralds of his presence, could never make

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