suffer, the higher is the end for which they are afflicted. It may be, they are learning inscrutable things of the same order with those which the apostle saw in ecstacy. Even with bleeding hearts and deep-drawn prayers for their consolation, let us try to believe that God is endowing them with surpassing tokens of love, and with pledges of exceeding glory. And for ourselves, let us be sure, when we suffer, that for chastisement and for purification we need more a thousand-fold than all He lays upon us. The heaviest and the sharpest of our sorrows is only just enough to heal us: "He doth not willingly afflict." If any thing short of our present trial would have wrought His purpose of love to us, He would have sent the lighter, and kept back the heavier; He would have drawn over our hearts a smooth rod of warning, and not a sharp edge of correction. But nothing short of what we have would do; any thing less, perhaps, would have been a shadow of eternal misery, woe without repentance. Let us remember, too, that sufferings do not sanctify they are only the seasons of sanctification; their end will be for good or ill, as we bear and as we use them; they are no more than times of invitation to diligent toil, like the softness of the earth after a keen and piercing shower. They hold in check, for a time, our spiritual faults, and prepare our hearts to receive and to retain deeper and sharper impressions of the likeness of our Lord. Let us count them precious, blessed seasons, though dim and overcast; seasons of promise and of springing freshness; tokens of His nearness and purpose to cleanse us for His own. "Blessed are ye that weep now." He that is greatly tried, if He be learning obedience, is not far from the kingdom of God. Our heavenly Father is perfecting the work He began in holy baptism; laying in the last touches with His wise and gentle hand. He that perfected His own Son through sufferings, has brought many sons to glory by the same rough road, even by the way that is desert." He is now bringing you home to Himself. Do not shrink because the path is broken and solitary, for the way is short, and the end is blessed. 66 SERMONXXXI. THE SLEEP OF THE FAITHFUL DEPARTED. 1 THESS. iv. 13, 14. Ports mouth "I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with Him." ONE great miracle in the new creation of God is this, that death is changed to sleep; and therefore in the writings of the New Testament we do not read of the "death" of the saints. "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth; but I go that I may awake him out of sleep." The "bodies of saints which slept arose. "We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." "David, after he had served his own generation by the will of God, fell on sleep;" even in the pelting of the bloody storm, the holy Stephen "fell asleep." And therefore St. Paul in the 992 1 St. John xi. 11. 4 Acts xiii. 36. 2 St. Matt. xxvii. 52. 3 1 Cor. xv. 51. text speaks of the saints unseen as of those that 66 sleep in Jesus;" and Christians were wont to call their burial-grounds cemeteries, or sleeping-places, where they laid up their beloved ones to sleep on and take their rest. Let us, therefore, see why we should thus speak of those whom we call the dead. First, it is because we know that they shall awake up again. What sleep is to waking, death is to the resurrection. It is only a prelude, a transitory state, ushering in a mightier power of life therefore death is called sleep, to shew that it has a fixed end coming. Much as the heathen felt after this, and mused, and boded, yet, after all, death and the world of the dead was to them a dreary night. They saw men going down into the dust, but they saw none come back again: they had heard no whispers of the resurrection of the body. If the disembodied spirit should live on, that was all they could attain unto; but even this was clouded and dim. And their poets were wont to bewail the fleetingness of life, and the unknown condition of the dead. They were wont to say: 66 Alas, alas, the mallows and the fresh herbs of the field, when they die, return again to life, and spring another year; but we, the great, the mighty, the wise, when once we die, and are laid in the hollow earth, we sleep a long, an endless, and unbroken sleep!" Even the Jews but dimly saw the coming shadows of the resurrection. Death was too nigh, too mighty, and too absolute; they saw and felt his dominion. Of his overthrow they had both promise and prophecy; but as yet he seemed too tyrannously strong to pass away into a transitory sleep. It was for the Gospel to reveal this mystery by the miracle of Christ's resurrection. It was revealed in act; and now death is destroyed. It is a kindly soothing rest to the wearied and world-worn spirit; and there is a fixed end to its duration. There is a waking nigh at hand; so that the grave is little more than the longest night's sleep in the life of an undying soul. Again; death is changed to sleep, because they whom men call dead do really live unto God. They were dead while they lived this dying life on earth, and dead when they were in the last avenues of death. But after they had once died, death had no more dominion: they escaped as a "bird out of the snare of the fowler; the snare" was "broken," and they were delivered. It may sound strange to unbelieving ears to say, that we are dead while we live, and alive when we die. But so it is. Life hangs not on matter, or on the organisation of matter. It is not as the harmony which rings out of a cunning instrument; but it is a breath, a spirit, a ray of the eternal being, pure, immaterial, above all grosser compounds, simple and indissoluble. In |