Page:Sermons preached in the African Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Thomas', Philadelphia.djvu/195

disasters which daily carry our fellow-creatures to the grave? Are you certain of living another week, another day, nay, another hour? Do you not see some as young, healthy and gay as yourselves, fade away under the blightings of disease, and finally fall like the leaves of autumn? Have you made a league with death that it shall not come nigh you? Were you not included in the sentence,—"Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return?" Ah! it cannot be long before the solemnly impressive words in our burial service will be pronounced over every one of us now in divine presence: "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Oh, does it become man, mortal man, critically situated as he is, passing swiftly through time to the eternal world, where his destiny will be unalterably fixed in a state of happiness or misery, depending upon the character formed in this probationary state; I say, does it become him in such circumstances, to be squandering his time