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the despairing anticipati has made death in self a violence to nature, and st as He allowed His c strom it. But He has cre g.ace, and it is now only one oa condition, the end of all The world beyond the st. less is it a prison, a R & Punishment, an exile. is right and glorious in the saints are there;

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SA MAMA, MA by some it, and in men with His Death, or beans meant by God, not to be the sumpar payment of a lebt due by a law of nature,

t un act of virtue, an act of faith, hope, and charity, the crown of a holy life, a sacrifice and

1 Hebrews xii. 22-24.

ct of religion of immense worth in His sight. Could we have the choice now between dying and being translated, in all Christian prudence, in consideration of the glory we may give to God, the likeness we may bear to our Lord, the merits we may gain for Heaven, we ought to make our choice for death, to have, as St. Paul says, "the sentence of death in ourselves." As it is better and nobler, and happier, in a Christian sense, to die for the faith, to die for charity's sake, rather than simply to die, so it is far better for us, being what we are, and with the prospect of Heaven before us, to die rather than not to die at all, and thus it is that this enemy is kept by our Lord, as it were, to be executed last. Death has become the servant of God and of His children, the gloom has been taken away, the fearfulness destroyed, the penal character changed into an occasion of merit. He will remain in the Kingdom of God as long as there is need of him. When the end shall have come, and the succession of generations closed, and the time of conflict over, and the Kingdom of eternal life set up, and the books of judgment closed for ever, and Satan chained, then death shall be swallowed up in victory. "Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself with them shall be their God, and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes, and death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor sorrow shall be any more, for the former things are passed away."1

1 Apoc. xxi. 3, 4.

RAS AN Ace 1, how we are to pray w Mundy ourselves by the sacraments and the wter was of the Church, what acts of faith and wen wat torg, veness, and humility and contrition and codority and resignation, we are to exercise. I say all these are written for us in the book of the

Passion, from the moment at which our Lord, remembering that He was now to pass out of the world to His Father, took the towel and the basin, and girded Himself and washed the feet of His disciples, to that last strong cry, "Father, into Thy hands I commend My Soul." The crucifix is the treasure of the Christian life, because there we read all that we have to do to live well, but above all things it is our treasure, because there we read. how we are to die. There are many Christians who turn away from it in the heyday of life and of enjoyment, almost as if they thought it a reproach which our Lord addressed to them, to remind them of what they had cost Him. Yes, the crucifix is a reproach to the sinner and to the thoughtless, who either are ready to trample on the sufferings which it records, or care little for them so long as they can have the benefits purchased by them. But no one who thinks seriously of death can love anything better than the memorial of his Saviour's love, which will not only teach him all that he requires to know, but will also bring him, as he studies it, the strength to act up to its teaching.

So then, my brethren in our Lord, with this new glory which He has shed upon death by His own last hours in Jerusalem and on Calvary, may we not say in very truth, that He has turned death into life, or at least He has made death the light and the beacon of life? Yes, indeed He has made it a beacon, but no light that human skill ever kindled and maintained, for the aid and salvation

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الود

Nav, still more it ices, for it reveals to Parthly light can show, it shows 15 some that awaits is when our course jece, le streets, the palaces, and the gardens. the gors of the heavenly nty of ar God, and de *..! monnd, and those blessed companions spho zone thither before is, holding out ther binds to is in welcome, while at the same me they ma pouring out their hearts in the tenderest supplication for us, that we also may have the grice to reach without shipwreck that blessed store, whera wa shail aside for ever and for ever with them, and with our God.

به