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that great Spiritual Insurance Company — the Church — sends her agent to insure us for eternity, we either neglect or refuse, though the policy she offers is infinitely desirable, her reliability infallible, and the premium ridiculously small. There is something fairly ghastly in our indifference to the issue of the death and judgment that await us; as there is in the picture of a pleasure party on the St. Lawrence, carousing in their frail bark as it sweeps downward to the falls; or a criminal singing a ballad on his way to the gallows. If God were, in an instant, to petrify this age, and one man were left to go around and inspect the stony figures, how many, think you, would he find to have been engaged at the last moment in the service of the world, and how few in the service of God? The reason is because we are asleep to the main issue; we have forgotten the one thing to be remembered. And our folly is without excuse. For, as surely as the sun rises and sets, so sure are we that the evening of time is coming, and thereafter the dawn of eternity. The dreary rain prefigures the tears to be shed over us; the snow that mantles blighted Nature reminds us of the shroud that awaits us and the decay that is our common lot. When the thunder booms we seem to hear the angel's trumpet calling the dead to judgment, and in the lightning's flash, which cometh out of the east and appeareth even unto the west, we are reminded of the coming of the Son of man. In the midst of life there is death; the grave is dug by the cradle's side, and the mother's lullaby is but the prelude to the