not to be occupied with the thoughts of it, but to allow it to surprise you. Death is certain; you then are foolish to dread the thoughts of it, and it ought never to be out of your sight. Think upon death, because you know not the hour it will arrive: think upon death, because it must arrive. This is the subject of the present Discourse.
Part I. — The first step which man makes in life, is likewise the first toward the grave: from the moment his eyes open to the light, the sentence of death is pronounced against him; and, as though it were a crime to live, it is sufficient that he lives to make him deserving of death. That was not our first destiny. The Author of our being had at first animated our clay with a breath of immortality: he had placed in us a seed of life, which the revolution of neither years nor time could have weakened or extinguished: his work was so perfect, that it might have defied the duration of ages, while nothing external could have dissolved or even injured its harmony. Sin alone withered this divine seed, overturned this blessed order, and armed all created beings against man: and Adam became mortal from the moment he became a sinner: " By sin," , said the apostle, " did death enter into the world."
From our birth, therefore, we all bear it within us. It appears, that, in our mother's womb, we have sucked in a slow poison, with which we come into the world; which makes us languish on the earth, some a longer, others a more limited period, but which always terminates in death. We die every day; every moment deprives us of a portion of life, and advances us a step toward the grave: the body pines, health decays, and every thing which surrounds assists to destroy us; food corrupts, medicines weaken us; the spiritual fire, which internally animates, consumes us; and our whole fife is only a long and painful sickness. Now, in this situation, what image ought to be so familiar to man as death? A criminal condemned to die, whichever way he casts his eyes, what can he see but this melancholy object? And does the longer or shorter period we have to live, make a sufficient difference to entitle us to think ourselves immortal on this earth?
It is true, that the measure of our lots is not alike: some in peace, see their days grow upon them to the most advanced age, and, inheritors of the blessings of their primeval age, expire full of years in the midst of a numerous posterity: others, arrested in the middle of their course, see, like king Hezekiah, the gates of the grave open for them while yet in their prime; and, like him, " seek in vain for the residue of their years:" there are some who only show themselves as it were on the earth, who finish their course with the day, and who, like the flowers of the field, leave scarcely an interval between the instant which views them in their bloom and that which sees them withered and cut off. The fatal moment marked for each is a secret written in the book of life, which the Lamb of God alone has a right to open. We all live, then, uncertain of the duration of our life; and this uncertainty, of itself so fit
