BUILDING IN THE DUST.

ONE of the greatest of all modern poets represents the planets as standing still in terror, and turning to ashen gray at the sound of the tolling hoofs of the death-steed; the heavens terrified as the earth by the woe which followed sin. Other poets have pictured to us young Cain, watching for the appearing of Death, in the gloomy shadows at nightfall by Eden. For God had said to the father of mankind, "In the day that thou eatest thereof, thou shalt surely die." Upon that day moral death entered the world.

The fact that Adam

lived between nine and ten centuries shows

that the emphasis of the penalty was moral, not physical.

Physical death had long reigned over the brute creation. It was, indeed, believed in former ages, that the death of every living creature was caused by tasting the forbidden fruit at the hand of our first mother; all partaking in man's sin save one undying bird, which flew away from the temptation, and lives to this day in the deserts. It is, perhaps, commonly supposed, that, in like manner, the physical death of the human race is owing to Adam's sin. It is, however, likely, that men, at some period of advancement, would have been removed from this scene of life, even if Adam had kept his first estate. The reign of death over the lower animals before the appearance of man makes it probable that this world was not designed for the final abode of our race. It is unquestionably true, that the mode of the removal of man from this life might have been different, as in the case of Enoch, if sin had not entered. It is not safe to say that the removal of man from this planet is certainly

the result of sin; but it is true, that the amazing brevity of life, compared with that of the fathers of the race, and the mastery of disease, and the mode of our passing out of life, are so intimately connected with sin as to make it suitable to speak of our own physical death as coming into the world with the fall of our first father. Physical as well as spiritual death. began to take upon itself the shape in which we see it, upon the day when Adam broke away from God. So death entered by sin; the decay of the body the symbol of the soul's disaster. The old curse which descended on Eden still overshadows us. Sin is all the time weaving shrouds; and every grave to-day is dug by the divine justice. In the Mosaic law, it is provided that when leprosy, a certain kind of mould, is found in the walls of a house, the whole building must be broken down: so, when sin has smitten the body, the body must be broken down and removed. Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. We dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, which are crushed before the moth. "The

body," says an old writer, "is more astonishing in our life than in our death; as it is more strange to see dust walking up and down in the dust than lying down in it."

Death is UNIVERSAL.

Death has passed on

all, for that all have sinned. It is in a sinning world that we find it written, "One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh." There is a perpetual pilgrimage to the lands of death. Crusades of men, women, and little ones, are marching thither. Little do we think how constant is the procession to the tomb. Every day the sun gazes upon more than eighty thousand funerals. The bier never stands still for a moment. The tolling of the bell, and the fall of clods upon the coffin, are sounds familiar in every village. We merely ask, "Whose funeral is it?"

“Whose feet to-day attain the goal,

And put their sandals by,

And, having filled their Lord's behest,

Are laid to moulder in the rest

Of many a century ?" 1

1 These lines were the last rhymes written by the author

alluded to upon p. 120.

When we look over the lands which in every town are devoted to death, it is no wonder if such gloomy wastes alarm men. We dwell among the tombs. The sexton is undermining us all. The ruins of the race cover great tracts of country, like the ruins of vast cities. In peace and in war, death is busy strewing the continents with the dead. In our war for the Union, the very birds learned funeral-airs, and battle-fields were turned into cemeteries. But during those four years, in which it was estimated that more than three-quarters of a million soldiers died by disease or in battle, the ordinary work of death went on in the world as usual, and an army of more than three times the entire population of the United States was so quietly laid away under ground, that no one thought to speak of it. More are beneath the ground than above it.

"All that tread

The globe are but a handful to the tribes

That slumber in its bosom."

The thirteen hundred millions now upon the