events in its experience, and all future events in its anticipation, and doth lie diffused over them in a purest heaven of delight or a saddest hell of grief, according as they are good and hopeful, or bad and gloomy. Sensation, that clouds the memory of the past and dims the anticipation of the future, is no more. The present world is no more, the animal part of man is no more, the knowing part of man which held converse with the accidents and changes of this world, is no more. Nothing is left but the moral and spiritual part of man, to make the best of that knowledge of eternity and the Eternal which it hath, of that love or hatred of eternity and the Eternal which it hath. It lancheth out of the world of sensual pleasures, out of the world of visible beauties, out of the world of proud ambitions, out of the world of avaricious accumulations, out of the world of manual and instrumental employments -And whither is it gone? into the spiritual world, whither nothing of all this can follow; and what remaineth but disappointment, tedium, shame, confusion of face, and every spiritual agony! unless while living in the midst of these same worlds of occupation she was not blinded and befooled and brutified by them, but kept a sacred reverence for her moral and spiritual part, reserving the best of every feeling, and the essence of every thought, and the first fruits of every enjoyment, to God her creator and her préserver, and now her Judge.

Such are our views of the state of the soul after

death, drawn for the satisfaction of the greater number, from observations made upon the soul in her present condition, and which we may now confirm for the special edification of the Believer by revelation, so far as it enters into this mysterious subject. Here must stand, in the first place, the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, revealing their several fates after dissolution, which are to be conceived as emblems of the sweet repose and fiery torture which their spirits did endure; the promise to the penitent thief upon the cross, of being that very night in paradise; the entrancing of St. Paul, when he beheld and felt things unutterable; the visions of John, in which he beheld the blessedness of the saints; and the constant allusion through the books of the New Testament to the judgment and coming of Christ as immediately at hand; of which more hereafter.

All these passages give one reason to suppose that, besides the sort of passive consequence of death described above, there may be some consequences of an active kind which we are not able to comprehend; that faculties may be given to our spirits by which they may taste the communion of other incorporate spirits, and be introduced to the angels and cherubim and seraphim of glory, conducted to their balmy seats of bliss, and borne along with them through airy space on errands and behests of God, taken into their pleasant associations, and trained like a younger sister in all the happy avocations of their being; or that the righteous spirits may be sepa

rated to a settlement of their own, to have spiritual enjoyment with each other, of which we cannot have the shadow of a thought in this corporeal state of existence;-while, on the other hand, the souls of the wicked may be delivered up to the mastery of spirits reprobate, and left in their disembodied state to their mercy, to be by them used and abused in ten thousand ways, to which the material earth is altogether strange. But into these regions, which belong, as hath been said, to the poet and the orator, the conductor of an argument hath not any right to enter.

During the long interval, therefore, from the stroke of death till the trump of God shall ring in death's astonished ear, the soul is, as it were, by the necessity of her existence, forced to engage herself with the work of self-examination and self-trial, according to the best standard which during life she knew. If she was enlightened in the divine constitution, she will examine herself according to the rules thereof, and soon ascertain whether she held it in reverence and took the appointed measures to obey it, or whether she cast it behind her back and trode it under foot. If, again, she had no revelation of God, but had to depend on the light of Nature alone, she will try herself according to that light, and discover whether she made virtue or vice her delight, good or evil her god. If she groaned under the bondage of false religion, and was deluded by superstition out of reason's government;

even then, whatever she believed in her conscience to be right, to that rule she will bring herself during this season of abstracted meditation. For in every country and state of mankind there is a line of division between the good and the bad, between the worthy and the worthless, which represents outwardly the inward sense which that people hath of a right and a wrong side of human character. By this, whatever it is, however imperfect, however weak, however erroneous, we judge that each soul of every kindred and nation and tongue upon the earth will be employed during the long intermediate state in examining itself, and suffering or enjoying according to the nature of its reflections.

Now, forasmuch as that man hath never been heard of, who could, in his cool, dispassionate moments, look back and reflect upon his life without a feeling of its unprofitableness, when compared with what it might and should have been, forasmuch as that man hath never lived, whose trials and besetting ills did form to his reflective mind any apology for his short-comings and misdemeanours; but all men, since Adam, have condemned themselves before even their embodied soul, when they took themselves to strict inquisition-how much more will they blame, how much less apologize before their disembodied soul, when every temptation of vanity, and every blind of passion and every avocation of thought which the body and the visible world cast in, is removed, and we are left solitary as in a wilderness, seri

ous and sober as in the presence of God, stricken by death out of a thousand misleading visions, and overwhelmed with a sense of forlorn abjectness! Each soul thus immersed in its ruminations, plunged and absorbed in its own conscious being, must accumulate a vast sense of its sinfulness, and a fearful apprehension of the issue. Happy, happy those, who have strong-holds of faith into which to turn, and know of a Saviour from that conscious guilt, under which every one, Jew, Gentile, Scythian, bond and free, must feel himself oppressed. These can deal with their overwhelming feelings, and they alone. I do not say that they alone shall pass the judgment-that is another question, from which we studiously refrain. But surely they alone know in this life how that sinfulness is to be wiped away, and therefore, unless after death some perceptions of a Saviour should be revealed to the virtuous of other communions, of which we speculate not, they must lie absorbed in their heavy consciousness of guilt, with a fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation.

Now then, in these beds, all dissolved in fear, and some conscious of hope, the spirits of the departed lie; and shrouded in mortality, or absorbed back again into matter's various forms, remain the bodies of the departed, until the archangel and the trump of God shall sound the dread summons through the chambers of nature and the abodes of the separated soul; whence they shall come and meet, and being once more by the power of God