alive, but who can tell how soon his turn must come, and come it will, and that soon in every case. What consolation, then, will he have on his dying bed? Will he begin to balance his account of merit and sin? Alas! there is no use in that. If the oral law be true, it was balanced on the last Day of Atonement, and the sins were found to outweigh the merits, as his approaching death testifies. Where then will he flee for refuge or for consolation? In the agony and feebleness of a death-bed hour there is no time for doing good works, and poverty may cut off the rabbinic hope of purchasing salvation. In the oral law there is no hope. Can he find it, then, in the law of Moses? That law requires perfect and universal obedience, and pronounces the sinner accursed. As an accursed sinner, then, he must stand at the bar of God, unless there be some other way and some other hope. When Jacob was on his death-bed he had another hope. He could say—
(
Hebrew characters)
"I have waited for thy salvation, O Lord." (Gen. xlix. 18.)
Oh! let the reader seek this salvation in time, that when
his last hour comes, he may be as calm, as happy, and as
full of hope as his pious forefather. He died in a foreign land,
but he died happy, trusting not in his own righteousness,
but in the salvation of God. He had learned by experience
that man cannot deliver himself from mere temporal trouble,
but that even there God is his only refuge and his hope, and
still more so in the hour of death and the day of judgment.
But he had learned also to believe in (Hebrew characters) the
Angel who had redeemed him from all evil, and was persuaded
that He would not forsake him in the great transition
from time to eternity. He had not put off the consideration of
salvation to the last. He could say, "I have waited for thy
salvation, O Lord," and therefore when the awful moment
arrived, he could in perfect tranquillity gather his children
about him, and tell them of Shiloh who was to come, and
of the salvation which he had expected.
No. XXXIV.
NEW YEAR, CONTINUED.
All who believe in Divine Revelation look forward to a
great day, when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, and
