when so little care is taken to sanction and enforce, with the sense of religion, the sentiment of fidelity? Where are the domestics who are accustomed to hear, in the families in which they live, these injunctions of the Apostle?— "Servants, be obedient unto your masters, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eye-service, as menpleasers, but, as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good-will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men."

There is, also, another consideration, which powerfully enforces this most interesting duty; and this is, that it will prepare your children and domestics for the public services of the sanctuary. Little benefit, comparatively, can be derived from the instruction which is attempted to be conveyed from the pulpit, if some provision of religious rudiments and of serious impressions has not been made at home. They hear the preacher; but, without anything to guide their thoughts, the services are to them a mere show, which engages their eyes, or sounds, which strike their ears. If they have not been trained up in habits of devotion, accustomed to serious deportment at prayer, and instructed in the Scriptures and the elements of Christianity elsewhere, can you expect them to enter, with pleasure and interest, into the service of the house of God?

I confess, when I look at the awful strides which, from the circumstances in which we have been placed, vice, fraud, and general unprincipledness have made and will continue to make among us, my heart sometimes sinks within me. Where, then, ye patriots, ye lovers of your country, who tremble for her safety, where can a check be placed to this increase of corruption, if it be not placed at home? The force of moral principle can never be pre

served, or, if lost, restored, but by the aid of religion; and, if the little domestic societies, of which every community is composed, are not first well principled, the day of refor mation is removed to an indefinite distance, and the day of evil is not far off. It is in your houses, and not in a larger association, that you can form nurseries of good men and good citizens. These are the fountains into which the salt must be cast; or the streams, which issue from them, will yet flow corrupting and corrupted, and every year will swell this dead sea with new pollution, till it spreads pestilence over our country, and overwhelms the city of our God.

Some, however, who do not feel for their country, may yet feel for themselves. To such I would say, religion is the great business of our lives, and these lives are short and precarious. This is our day, in which we are exhorted to mind the things which belong to our peace, before they are hidden from our eyes forever. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom;" and this fear will not cease to be our truest wisdom, when the maxims and the fashions of the present age shall have vanished like a dream.

WHY IS DEATH TERRIBLE?

ONE year has just past, and another is commencing its revolution; and this fair sun will only rise and set a few times, and again a year will have elapsed. And what is this strange and awful consummation, to which the lapse of another year has brought us nearer ? What is it, which is included in that little word, death, which thrills the nerves and curdles the blood of thousands and tens of thousands?

In the first place, there is an air of awful uncertainty always surrounding the event. We look forward, and cannot assign it to any particular period. Every instance of mortality, which occurs, tends to enhance the uncertainty. "One dieth in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet;" another cometh to the grave mature in years and virtues, or with infirmities and vice drops rotten into the tomb. Yet, though the exact moment, when we shall be summoned hence, can never be ascertained, the certainty of the event itself amounts to a degree of assurance, which no other subject can possibly acquire. But can death be sudden to him who knows that there is nothing more certain than the event, and nothing more uncertain than the time?

Another cause of our dread is to be found in the idea, which is entertained, of the exquisite pangs of dissolution. But who has issued from the chambers of the tomb, who has uttered an audible voice from the coffin, to tell us the

pangs through which he has just been passing? Do we gather this from supposing that what terminates a series of pains and calamities, of sickness and sorrows, must be more painful, more agonizing than any, because it is the last? Those, who have recovered from severe disorders, have passed through, perhaps, worse than the pangs of death without dissolution; and the crisis of any acute complaint is as painful, when it leaves us alive, as when it extinguishes forever our sensibility. It is not, then, pain, which we fear, for martyrdom has seen its thousands encircled in flames, and slowly consumed; but it is death, that comprehensive word, in which so many terrors combine and coalesce.

Another source of our fear of death is to be found, perhaps, in the idea, that it is not only the last event in the series of those acts and feelings which constitute life, but that it is also something peculiarly new and extraordinary. But there is no reason why an event should be encircled with terror merely from its relative position in the order of time, or of number, or of place; and the novelty alone is no more a reason of alarm than it would be to a blind man to dread the sudden recovery of his sight, because it would open to him an utterly new and unimagined train of sensations and ideas.

But we proceed to another and fruitful source of apprehension, the circumstances and appearances which belong to this dreadful figure of our mortality. Death is mentioned, and instantly there occurs to our imagination a long train of melancholy images, the lifeless and bloodless corpse, the altered features, the dead and sunken eye. Our fancy then flies instantly to the tomb, and finds it cold, and comfortless, and silent, and dark; she sees there the

shroud which wraps the dead, the close imprisoning coffin, and innumerable images offensive and horrible to living curiosity. But these are all terrors of the imagination, to which education and habit have given an ascendancy, but which the understanding may easily surmount, and of which the mind ought to be divested.

I have thus hastily mentioned the principal sources of that inexplicable dread of death, which is almost a universal sentiment. The whole world bows tremblingly at the footstool of this monarch of corporeal existence. We paint his course with darkness; his guards are spectres of despair; his sceptre touches us with cruel dismay; his sway extends not only through the cold realms of forgetfulness, which are his hereditary dominions, but his future subjects close their eyes, alarmed at the imaginary aspect of the monarch, whom they have arrayed in all the appendages of oppressive and melancholy horror.

But whence this paralyzing fear? Indeed, I cannot believe that the circumstances, which I have enumerated, are sufficient, either separately or combined, to produce a feeling which appears to be so instinctive and universal. These explications, the more we examine, appear more unsatisfactory and inadequate. Hence I look around me for some other source of these painful apprehensions, and I have found it. Ye incredulous idolaters of nature, who would banish a God from creation, as you have banished him from your reasonings, your fears have betrayed you. It is not dying which you dread; you tremble lest you should not die. Something whispers that you may live again. Here, here is the spring of anxiety, in the righteous and moral government of a Being who can bring us before his bar, and to whom it as easy to resuscitate as to destroy.