Excerpt from Plain Sermons, Vol. 5: By Contributors to the Tracts for the Times

But let us follow the course of a soul thus casting Off the world, and cast ofl by it. It goes forth as a stranger on a journey. Man seems to die and to be no more, when he is but quitting us, and is really beginning to live. Then he sees sights which before it did not even enter into his mind to conceive, and the world is even less to him than he to the world. Just now he was lying on the bed of sickness, but in that moment of death what an awful change has come over him What a crisis for him There is stillness in the room that lately held him; nothing is doing there, for he is gone, he now belongs to others; he now belongs entirely to the lord who bought him; to him he returns; but whether to be lodged safely in His place Of hope, or to be im prisoned against the great day, that is another matter, that depends on the deeds done in the body, whether good or evil. And now what are his thoughts P How infinitely important now appears the value Of time, now when it is nothing to him Nothing; for though he Spend centuries waiting for christ, he cannot now alter his state from bad to good, or from good to bad. What he dieth that he must be for ever; as the trace falleth so must it lie. This is the comfort of the true servant Of god, and the misery of the transgressor. His lot is cast once and for all, and he can but wait in hope or in dread. Men on their death beds have declared, that no one could form a right idea of the value Of time till he came to die; but if this has truth in it, how much more truly can it be said after death! What an estimate shall we form of time while we are waiting for judgment! Yes, it is we - all this, I repeat, belongs to us most intimately. It is not to be looked at as a picture, as a man might read a light book in a leisure hour. We must die, the youngest, the healthiest, the most thoughtless we must be thus unnaturally torn in two, soul from body; and only united again to be made more thoroughly happy or miserable for ever.

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