he regards them as desperate reliefs, which are hazarded when hope is over, and which are bestowed more for the consolation of the living than from any prospect of utility to those who are departing. Servants of Jesus Christ are called in to support him in this last moment; whilst all he is enabled to do, is, secretly to envy their lot, and to detest the misery of his own. His friends and relations are assembled round his bed, to receive his last sighs, and he turns away from them his eyes, because he finds still amidst them the remembrance of his crimes. Death, however, approaches; the minister endeavours to support, by prayer, the spark of life which still remains: " Depart, Christian soul \" says he. He says not to him, Prince, grandee of the world, depart. During his life, the public monuments were hardly sufficient for the number and pride of his titles: in this last moment they give him that title alone which he had received in baptism; the only one to which he had paid no attention, and the only one which can remain to him for ever. Depart, Christian soul. Alas! he had lived as if the body had formed his only being and treasure: he had even tried to persuade himself that his soul was nothing, that man is only a composition of flesh and blood, and that every thing perishes with us: he is now informed that it is his body, which is nothing but a morsel of clay now on the point of crumbling into pieces, and his only immortal being is that soul, that image of Divinity, that intelligence, alone capable of knowing and loving its Creator, which now prepares to quit its earthly mansion and appear before his awful tribunal. Depart, Christian soul. You had looked upon the earth as your country; and it was only a place of pilgrimage from which you must depart. The church thought to have announced glad tidings to you, the expiration of your exilement, in announcing the dissolution of your earthly frame; alas! and it only brings you melancholy and frightful news, and opens the commencement of your miseries and anguish!
Depart, then, Christian soul. — Soul, marked with the seal of salvation, which you have effaced, — redeemed by the blood of Jesus Christ which you have trampled under foot, — purified by the grace of regeneration, which you have a thousand times stained, — enlightened by the lights of the faith, which you have always rejected, — loaded with all the tender mercies of heaven, which you have always unworthily profaned — depart, Christian soul. Go, and carry before Jesus Christ that august title, which should have been the illustrious mark of thy salvation, but which now becomes the greatest of thy crimes.
Then, the expiring sinner, no longer finding in the remembrance of the past but regrets which overwhelm him, — in all which takes place around him but images which afflict him, — in the thoughts of futurity but horrors which appal him, — no longer knowing to whom to have recourse, — neither to created beings, who now leave him, — nor to the world, which vanishes, — nor to men, who cannot save him from death, — nor to the just God, whom he looks upon as a declared enemy, and from whom he has no indulgence to expect — a thousand horrors occupy his thoughts; he torments, he agitates
