righteous man: how grand and inestimable will your heart then acknowledge it to be!
In the one, you will comprehend all the misery of a soul which has lived forgetful of its God; in the other, the happiness of him who has lived only to please and to serve him; in a word, the picture of the death of the sinner will make you wish to live the life of the righteous; and the image of the death of the just will inspire you with a holy horror at the life of the sinner.
Part I. — In vain do we repel the image of death: every day brings it nearer. Youth glides away; years hurry on; and, like water, says the scripture, spilt upon the ground, which cannot be gathered up again, we rapidly course toward the abyss of eternity, where, for ever swallowed up, we can never return upon our steps to appear once more upon the earth.
I know that the brevity and uncertainty of life are continual subjects of conversation to us. The deaths of our relations, our friends, our companions, frequently sudden, and always unexpected, furnish us with a thousand reflections on the frailty of every thing terrestrial.
We are incessantly repeating that the world is nothing, that life is but a dream, and that it is a striking folly our interesting ourselves so deeply for what must pass so quickly away. But these are merely words: they are not the sentiments of the heart: they are discourses offered up at the shrine of custom; and that very custom occasions their being immediately and for ever forgot.
Now, my brethren, form to yourselves a destiny on this earth agreeable to your own wishes: lengthen out, in your own minds, your days to a term beyond your most sanguine hopes. I even wish you to indulge in the enjoyment of so pleasing an illusion: but, at last, you must follow the track which your forefathers have trod; you will at last see that day arrive, to which no other shall succeed; and that day will be the day of your eternity. Happy if you die in the Lord: miserable if you depart in sin. One of these lots awaits you. In the final decision upon all men there will be only two sides — the right and the left: two divisions — the goats and the sheep. Allow me, then, to recall you to the bed of death, and to expose to your view the double spectacle of this last hour, so terrible to the sinner, and so consolatory to the righteous man.
I say, terrible to the sinner, who, lulled by vain hopes of a conversion, at last reaches this fatal moment, full of desires, empty of good works, having ever lived a stranger to the Lord, and unable now to make any offering to him but of his crimes, and the anguish of seeing a period put to those days which he vainly believed would have endured for ever. Now, nothing can be more dreadful than the situation of this unfortunate wretch in the last moments of his life? Whichever way his mind is employed, whether in recalling the past, or considering what is acting around him: in a word, whether he penetrates into that awful futurity upon the brink of which he hangs, or limits his reflections to the present moment,
