be the submission of slaves, but the acquiescence of

sons.

Let us notice, in the next place, Job's personal application and appropriation of the truth in the text"I know that Thou wilt bring me to death." For want of this, we miss the full effect of many of the most influential truths. Yet personal religion is em phatically the religion of the Bible; its truths are not only for humanity, but for me. "Thou wilt bring me to death." "I know that my Redeemer liveth." "I know in whom I have believed." "Whom have I in heaven but Thee?"

Do you thus translate Christianity from the impersonal into the personal? Do you feel that the Bible was written and inspired as much for you, as if you were the only person in the universe? Do you so search it? Faith will enable you thus to concentrate scattered lights in one personal focus, and in its light to see your own souls linked to all great and enduring things above, below, or around you.

We have, next, the description of that change, of which the patriarch was thus personally assured. He calls it "death," and "the house appointed for all living." Death is the child of sin, though grace has made it the servant of Jesus. It is not annihilation. It is the separation, however, of soul and body; the latter ceasing to live, and the former leaving its tenement of clay as the lightning leaves its cloud, and changing, not its character, but its outward circumstances. The twain that God joined, death puts asunder; the holy

wedlock is dissolved, the widowed dust reposes in the tomb, and the living spirit returns to Him who gave it, to wait the sound of the last trump, and the heaving of the last earthquake.

"When the judgment trumpet calls,

Soul, rebuild thy house of clay,-
Immortality its walls,

And eternity its day."

There is nothing natural or desirable in death itself. It is the disorganization of an exquisite structure, the dissolution of a casket second only in loveliness and beauty to the jewel it contains; and therefore humanity, in all its instincts, shrinks from the catastrophe. "We that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened; not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life." The apostle would brave the swellings of Jordan, but only because of the beauty of the land that lies beyond it. We are ready to pass through the fiery ordeal, because conscious of the truth, that the skirts of our garments only shall be singed, while the soul, safe as in the citadel of God, shall only shine with greater lustre, rising on imperishable pinions, and resting not till it soars and sings with the seraphim beside the throne.

The body will not only experience death, but come also to "the house appointed for all living."

This is the only house that may be called the house of humanity. Into this house, palaces, courts, parliaments, churches, all incessantly pour forth their in

mates. It is the abode of kings and queens, of nobles, clergy, peasants, and beggars. It absorbs and annihilates all the petty distinctions of humanity. It is the stand-point, seen from which illustrious castles and ancestral halls dwindle into diminutive and remote perspective. Around the green hillocks of the dead, every sect might feel Catholic, and bitter foes grow friendly, and jarring mankind become conscious of the gravitating influence of essential and common brotherhood.

It is a dark house-" a land of darkness and the shadow of death; a land of darkness as darkness itself, and of the shadow of death, without any order, and where the light is as darkness."

There is no lamp suspended from its ceiling, no penetrating sunbeam, by the light of which the dead can read the promises, or learn the doctrines of the Word of God. The first light that shall burst upon its chambers, will be the twilight of an eternal day.

It is a solitary house. Though the kings and councillors of the earth are there, and with them the myriad millions of mankind, yet is there no communion; each is as much alone, as if none else were there.

It is also a silent house. "There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be at rest. There the prisoners rest together; they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and great are there, and the servant is free from his master." Though so many groups of the dead are there, yet all is silence without suspension. The tongue of the eloquent is dumb, and the ear of the once captivated hearer is deaf. The

living preacher may make the tombstone his pulpit, and the green sod his fald-stool, but the sleepers beneath hear him not. Over them the chimes of Sabbath bells may float, undulating in the air like a mother's brooding note, calling her children home: but they hear not. The first and only sound that will shake the ashes of the dead, or break the silence of the sepulchre, will be the knell of a dissolving world"Arise, ye dead, and come to judgment."

It is, too, an ancient house. Its first stone was laid in Paradise, and each generation since has been a layer added to it. Every living creature has risen like a wavelet, and kings, and nobles, and scholars, like wavelet crests on this ever-ebbing, ever-sounding sea, and have been sucked into its vortex in succession, and disappeared.

But even this house "appointed for all living," has a sun-lit side. It is not an eternal prison-house, but a resting-place, a cemetery-xounтngio-a sleeping place. I see written upon every stone in the crowded churchyard-"The hour is coming, in the which all that are in their graves shall hear His voice, and shall come forth, they that have done good unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil unto the resurrection of damnation." I can hear in the depths of its silent chambers the lingering echoes of the voice of Jesus"I am the resurrection and the life." And, probably, if I have appealed to nature-its autumn, its sleep, and its changes, for witnesses that all must die, we can educe no unimpressive intimations from the same lesson-book that all will live. The bud peeping from

the hard bark of the tree-the rose emerging from the dry root-the winged insect from its chrysalis-are eloquent premonitions of death evolving life and im

mortality. Even decay itself has tints of life; the leaves that fall in autumn turn golden as they dropthe cold bleak winds of winter come in music, and the icicles suspended from the eaves of our houses, reflect the glories of the rainbow, and the sheen of palaces beyond the skies, as if to teach us to read resurrection lessons on the trophies and monuments of death.

It is not a strange house. Our fathers, and mothers, and sisters, and brothers, have pre-occupied it. Their ashes are peacefully reposing under its guardianship.

"Grave, the guardian of our dust,

Grave, the treasury of the skies;
Every atom of its dust,

Rests in hope again to rise."

The Lord of glory lay in it, perfuming it by His presence, and giving it a consecration which neither presbyters nor prelates can impart. “Come, see where the Lord lay." On this house "appointed for all living," the fifteenth chapter of the first epistle to the Corinthians is inscribed for an epitaph.

My brethren, I have illustrated the text by my sermon; I must one day enforce it by my death. The emphasis of the latter will enforce whatever eloquence or earnestness may be in the former. I witnessed the truth of this, last Friday, when I beheld the remains of the Rev. William Nicholson, Rector of St. Maurice, Winchester, and the brother of my wife, lowered, in