sinners commonly work against the Lord for their own downfall. My brethren, there is a warning from our Lord which ought to wake with us every morning, and never should rest till we fall asleep at night," Watch, and pray." Pharaoh followed his own heart, left it uncorrected, and fulfilled the desires thereof; he was drowned in the mighty waters. We may walk in his steps, and leave our hearts worldly, proud, wilful, or careless; and if we do, the example of the King of Egypt will be made manifest in us, for we have before us "the sea of fire."

SERMON XXIII.

Easter Sunday.

ROMANS Vi. 8.

Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also

live with Him.

THE words of my text, which are taken from the

Second Lesson for this day's service, contain a very clear intimation, indeed a direct conditional promise, of a future state of existence with the Lord Christ in heaven. The certainty of a future life after death all Christians have considered to be confirmed by the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. Indeed, the doctrine of a future life is so frequently and so fully stated in the Gospels, the promise of immortality is so often and so boldly made, that, coupling these statements and promises with the return of our Lord to life after His death on the cross, we must either reject the Gospels altogether as inspired books, or we must accept the doctrine of a future life without reserve.

This firm belief in another and that an eternal life, is one of the great differences between the ancient heathen world and the present Church built up by Christ. The heathens indeed anciently, though they were uninstructed by any direct revelations

Z

from the Lord, could not but fervently hope that there was a life hereafter. "They knew not God"," and therefore they knew not to a certainty that hereafter they would be called to pass into another world. Still there was a natural, an unborn hope, that there might be another life after this. It is possible that this had been traditionary from the earliest times; but however that may be, we see occasionally in the writings of their wisest and best men that there was an ardent wish, "a longing after immortality," a fervent, I might almost say a faithful, expectation that death would not be the end of all things.

The subtle Greek found many ingenious reasons why he might look on to an existence after the grave; he could not readily bring himself to believe that the destruction of the flesh, the baser part, would, as a matter of necessity, destroy the spirit also; a spirit which was so superior as to feel independent of the body; a spirit which was at once the director, the preserver, and the governor of the body, and which, when it has fulfilled these functions day by day, could then in a manner leave the body out of thought, and go on into other thoughts, calculations, and enquiries in which the mere body could take no concern at all. That this spirit must die because the body wherein it dwelt would die, did not seem to the Greek to be by any means a fixed and necessary truth. So also the proud Roman would

a 1 Thess. iv. 5.

not believe that his inflexible mind must sink into nothing when a weak body decayed. Death seemed to him more as a person leaving his house,—the soul leaving the body,-than as the total and inevitable destruction of both. The habit of embalming the dead by the Egyptians probably comprehended the idea of keeping the body in readiness for the return of the soul at the resurrection. In less civilized races we find the same belief; and a heaven of eternal revelry, boundless hunting-fields with the neverending sport, and perpetual wars with never-failing victories, formed the imaginary but the well-believed rewards of eternity which awaited the brave and the upright among our Scandinavian and Teutonic forefathers. In short, to every reflecting heathen the soul had always appeared so widely distinguished by superior faculties from the fleshly tenement in which it dwelt, that a strong and lively hope, I may say a fond and cherished expectation, was entertained by the wise, and was accepted by the uninformed, that another and a better world would receive after death the upright soul, and that there would be his peaceful dwelling-place for ever.

We may well believe that this hope, this light, was permitted by the mercy of God to spread abroad, and to cheer the darkness of the heathen world. Doubtless this warm expectation was kept alive in the hearts of the virtuous but spiritually unenlightened heathens, to comfort them in their toilsome journey through a darkened, a hard, and a wicked world,

and to hold out to them, if not a promise, still a soothing and a strong probability that beyond the grave there was a life of peace, virtue, and happiness without end.

Moreover, these hopes of a future life proved a great blessing to the heathens. They assisted, more than any thing, in preserving what little morality the world contained. They gave to teachers of character and eminence the power to enforce the doctrine of good living by the hope of an everlasting reward when this life had ended. This expectation also gave terror to law and to earthly punishment by threatening disgrace and perpetual punishment in the world to come.

But if this hope of another life, this unassured expectation of immortality, could conduce so much to keep a darkened world in some degree of rule and happiness; if the slight glimmering of the truth of God could guide the uncertain world into some, though a very shortened, amount of moral living and comfort; what may we not suppose would happen when the full light of the Gospel arose upon benighted man, and shewed him that the eternal resting-place which he was vainly enquiring after in the errors of darkness, was both secured to him for a certainty, and was also close at hand? How great may we not suppose his satisfaction, how ready, how careful his acceptance, how joyful his gratitude, how firm his belief, when every hope which his ingenuity had prompted, every calculation which his reason