Those who have had the best opportunities for judging-aged physicians of large practice, and pastors with wide and varied experience say that the evidence is strongly against the value of what is sometimes called death-bed repentance; since, in those cases where the patients recover, it is found that the state is not abiding. An English physician kept a record of three hundred cases in which persons supposed that they became Christians while upon a sick-bed, and afterwards recovered; and only ten out of the whole number gave good evidence of a changed life. An American physician, who kept a similar record, counted only three out of a hundred. City pastors, who go to the dying almost every day, find, of all those who are anxious for themselves in their last hours, scarcely one a year giving satisfactory ground for hope. The fact is, that, when the human soul is so hardened in sin as not to repent and believe in health, one is not likely to make a radical change when the powers of body and mind are prostrated by sickness. And though it is true that there are some remarkable

cases of conversion in time of severe sickness, in which the persons, upon recovery, prove to be really renewed, yet it must be considered the common rule, that purposes formed under the agonies of disease and the excitement of an expected death, do not stand against the temptations of life. Practically, for myself, I have so little confidence in sick-bed experiences, that I do not look to see men become Christians when they are sick, who would not when they were well. Death-bed baptisms, as anciently practised, were deemed so worthless, that we find Athanasius relating to his people an anecdote of the angel, who once complained of his episcopal predecessor for sending him so many "sacks, carefully sealed up, with nothing whatever inside."

There is so little probability that men will suitably attend to life's business when they come to die; and there is so little evidence, when it is attempted, that it is successful; we must consider it most prejudicial to speak very confidently of the well-being of those who have led most godless lives, and then expressed

contrition, and received unction, when they could not well do otherwise. Whatever we may hope in our hearts, we can say little.1

Christian faithfulness may not neglect the dying; but it is to spend itself chiefly upon the living. Turn we from the house of the dying to the home of the living, and we find the next neighbor persisting in delaying repentance, putting it off, perchance, to the death-bed hour. I miss faces from my congregation, and I mourn over them; but the saddest thought is for those in health, who defer the time for returning to the heavenly Father.

It is to them that I now turn, affectionately asking, ― Do you say that it is never too late to repent? I answer, that it is never too early to repent. It is a desperate amusement to play at a game of hazards, to see how near you can come to missing heaven, and yet enter. What you are in health, you will probably continue to be in death. The moral

1 “Spera, quia unus; time, quia solus.” Hope, because

there is one; fear, because there is but one.

stupor induced by habits of sin may hold sway over the soul in the last hours. Or, if you are terrified at the approach of the grave, little use, my friends, will it be for me to go to you when you are under that strange excitement of dying; there will be no respite in which I can quiet your well-grounded alarms. Let me entreat you, rather, in the full glow of health to-day, to form an intimate friendship with One, who, when your eyes become dim, will light up your pathway, and lead you through the dark valley in peace.

.

V.

THE LIGHT.

THERE is a constitutional fear of death, which cannot be overcome by moral considerations, any more than our instinctive fear of fire. The law of self-preservation draws us away from death. We shrink from the act of dying. It was this, perhaps, which Plato alluded to, when he spoke of "the child within us, who trembles before death." The love of life and the fear of death are implanted in our natures to protect us: they call upon us to stand aloof, so long as may be, from the hour in which we shall give up this known mode of being, and take up that which lies beyond it. The sensations of the hour of departure are so unique, that men do not willingly encounter them. It is well that it is so, else many would be tempted, when weary, to cast off life, and