SERMON I.

THE HOUSE APPOINTED FOR ALL LIVING.

BY THE

REV. JOHN CUMMING, D.D.,

MINISTER OF THE NATIONAL CHURCH, CROWN COURT, COVENT GARDEN.

JOB XXX. 23.

"I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living."

SUCH was the conviction of the afflicted patriarch; and such too must be our own experience, as well as that of all living. There is intimated in these words the absolute certainty of death. "It is appointed to all men once to die." All around may be uncertain, but this is sure. The fairest form must mingle with

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the dust; the strongest frame must be dissolved; the most exalted in the circles of mankind must one day

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say to corruption, Thou art my mother; and to the worm, Thou art my sister." Every preacher of this truth must personally practice it. If we had the wings of the eagle, we could not escape from it; if the strength of the lion, we could not resist it; if the riches of Croesus, we could not bribe death; or if the voice of the nightingale, we could not charm it away. It takes the monarch from his throne, the minister from his pulpit, the babe from the bosom of its mother. It comes to all, without exception; only, like the wilderness pillar, what is glory to Israel, is darkness to Egypt. Every eye that is now rivetted on me, shall very soon be sealed in darkness; every ear that now hears me, deaf; and the pulse of every heart, still; and every home the habitation of another; and "the place that knows us now, shall know us no more for ever."

But it may be asked, what were the definite grounds on which Job could conclude, “I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living?"

These were, in the first place, what he saw around him on every side.

The history of his own household was to him the sure prophecy of his own dissolution, as well as the premises on which he raised the prophetic annunciation in the text. There were tombs beside him in the land of Uz, as well as in England; and on the memorial tablets of his dead, he had already inscribed

as their epitaph this creed, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord." On the green acres of his native land there rose graves, like wavelets on the ebbing sea of life. It was sown with the dead. He himself stood upon the ashes of his children, a forest tree reft of the parasite plants that gave it beauty in exchange for sustenance, naked, dismantled; and every wind that swept past awoke amid the tossed and torn affections of his desolated heart-"I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living." Have we no similar mementos? Are there not in our memories still the lingering echoes of the muffled bell? Are there not in our homes broken circles whose arcs will not be complete till time be no more? Look at the portrait on the wall-at the hatchment on the house-the hair in that locket-those books in the library-the mourners in the streets; and does not every one of these fragments reflect a known likeness, and present a comment on this our text?

Job's own bodily sufferings intimated also the same result. These increased and accumulated, and plainly tended, unless arrested in the providence of God, to dissolution. Disease is still the pioneer of death, the caterer for the grave. Every grey hair is evidence that death has breathed upon us; every headache, the touch of the icy finger of death on the seat of life, constituting each in succession an intimation from on high, "Set your house in order"-a premonition of the text.

Creation around him impressed on him the same

conclusion. In the fourteenth chapter he shews he had thus learned, and gives instances of this teaching: "Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble; he cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down; he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not." The whole of this chapter is replete with such imagery. Does not autumn still preach the death of the year? When its breath hath swept the forests of the earth, the very trees look like crowds of skeletons shivering in the storm, yet pointing to the skies as if in expectancy of a revisit of the resurrection of the spring. Night is the death of day. Sleep, which is peculiar to earth, unknown in heaven, and impossible in hell, is a semi-suspension of life-a type of death. Awake, we seem to have a hold of life; asleep, we seem to have let life go, and to lie helplessly at the mercy of death.

One would

Job learned the lesson in the text from divine teaching. He spoke, as did all the sacred writers, by the Spirit of God: "Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither." imagine that there would be very little necessity that God should teach a lesson, every one cannot but see. One would imagine it as unnecessary to teach this, as that the needle points to the north. But if we may judge of the force of a conviction by the influence it exerts, we cannot but conclude that in this instance this is feeble indeed. We feel the truth in the text in all its fulness and power, when we bury our dead; but soon the pomps of time, the pageantry of circumstance, and the excitements and rivalries of the world, sweep

over our hearts, and impressions we thought engraven by a pen of iron on the rock for ever, are effaced, like inscriptions on the sand, by the first wave of the advancing tide. David, aware of this, prays, "Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days, that I may know how frail I am." "Teach us so to number our days, that we may apply our hearts to wisdom."

Let us here also learn who is the immediate dis

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penser of death. "Thou wilt bring me to death." We are prone to attribute all to second causes. death comes, we are often found saying, "If it had been so, it had been otherwise; if such aid had been called in, if such precautions had been taken, he had not died." Faith will raise its head above all such encompassing perplexities, and say with Eli-"It is the Lord." Job, amid the dim lights of the patriarchal dispensation, could say, "Not the winds that smote, nor the Sabeans that assailed, but the Lord, hath taken away. 999 "Thou wilt bring me to death.” "The hairs of our head are numbered," and the days of our "Is there not an appointed time to man on Disease has no infection, and death no power, till the one is loosed, aud the other commissioned from God. He cuts down the flower, and, blessed thought! He spares the green and takes the ripe. What comes, is "the cup my Father hath given me to drink;" and when most inexplicable, we have still light enough to read-" What I do thou knowest not now, but thou shalt know hereafter." Our feeling, however, in such circumstances, must not

life also. earth ?"

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