ON DEATH.
SECOND SERMON.
ON THE FREQUENT CONSIDERATION OF DEATH.
Subject.
The frequent consideration and remembrance of death is one of the best means of leading a holy life.—Preached on the fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Text.
Ecce defunctus efferebatur.—Luke vii. 12.
“Behold, a dead man was carried out.”
Introduction.
“Behold, a dead man was carried out;” one who was in the bloom of youth, who was enjoying life in all the vigor of health and strength, and who was, moreover, the only son of his sorrowing mother, the only consolation left to her in her widowed state! “Behold, a dead man was carried out, the only son of his mother.” He it is whom they are bringing to the grave. Thus death has no respect for age, or sex, or health, or prayers, or entreaties; he hurries all off without mercy, without distinction, young and old, great and lowly, together. My dear brethren, which of us who are here now alive and well, shall be the first to be carried out dead? Shall it be I, or you, or some one else? We know not; but of a certainty every one’s turn will come, sooner or later, whether we like it or not. And yet we think so little of it! Daily, almost, do we see a corpse carried to the grave, and we look at it as if it were nothing at all to us; nay, if sometimes a thought of death tries to intrude itself, we endeavor to shake it off as unnecessary, tending to melancholy and sadness. But
