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SERMON XX.

Making a Will.

PREACHED AT THE CLOSE OF THE YEAR.

66

2 KINGS XX. I.

THUS SAITH THE LORD, SET THINE HOUSE IN ORDER ; FOR THOU SHALT DIE AND NOT LIVE."

HE Church of England, in her Office for the Visitation of the Sick, gives her ministers this instruction in one of the rubrics :-"If the sick man hath not before disposed of his goods, let him then be admonished to make his Will, and to declare his debts, what he oweth and what is owing to him; for the better discharging of his conscience, and the quietness of his executors. But men should often be put in remembrance to take order for the settling of their temporal estates whilst they are in health."

Many people do not like the idea of making a will. A will only comes into force after the testator's death.

Death is a subject alien to their thoughts; and a will is too forcible a reminder that we are but mortal, to find any favour with them. They put it off and put it off, till at last the hand of death is really upon them, and then, in all haste, summon the lawyer to their bedside, who probably finds them almost unable to think of details or of business at all; and either they make no disposition of their property, or make it without due care and thought; and so, through their neglect, leave their last act a monument of folly, or, perhaps, of injustice, to those who come after them.

The words of the text, taken in their first and plain sense, surely tell every man that he ought to have some regard for the settling of his temporal affairs while he has sense and reason left him. "Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live." As the reason applies to us all, so the duty is equally extensive in its application.

But, it should be borne in mind, that affairs change; that what may be a fair disposition of your goods to-day, will not be so five years hence; that an old will is sometimes as bad as no will at all. Perhaps, during the next five years, fresh children may be born to you; perhaps others may die; perhaps the value you attach to-day to a certain portion of your property, may be considerably altered for the better or for the worse in the next year or two; and if to-day's will remain in force for those years to come, an injustice may be done to your children. Hence, while your Church, in this rubric, advises you to make your will while in health, she certainly also enjoins you to revise it from time to time, lest it become obsolete

or inapplicable to the circumstances of your estate at the time of your decease.

No man ought to dispose of his property lightly or thoughtlessly. We are stewards for God of such worldly goods as we possess; and just as we are, on that account, bound to expend some portion of that property in alms and offerings to God, and to expend no portion of it in rioting or in excess, so are we bound to see that when God summons us away from this part of His kingdom to that where property follows us not, we make a just and fair disposal of that of which in life He allowed us to be His stewards.

Men often are afraid of public opinion: the most wilful occasionally wince under that ordeal. But, I confess, that of all the kinds of public opinion which a father of a family ought to regard, the most terrible is the verdict, after his death, of his own offspring. If they have to suffer injustice for life through his thoughtlessness, his carelessness, his disregard of the certainty of death, and his consequent neglect to make a proper disposition of his property while in health and strength, his children can hardly be expected to rise up and call his memory blessed.

But, in doing this, regard must be had to justice. An unjust will must be, I should think, a terrible bar to entering with joy into the presence of God. A will, knowingly and purposely made harsh and unfair to survivors, surely will rise up in the Judgment and condemn that unjust testator. "The evil that men do, indeed, lives after them," when this last, and lasting, act of their life bears the stamp of malice, or of plain injustice towards

those whom they ought to love and cherish, as well in death as in life. Yet some people, out of mere wantonness or caprice, out of spite, or out of the love of power -and certainly power, of a poor sort it is true, yet power may be shown in the dying hand delivering a piece of treachery to wife, or child, or friend, as its last act and deed some people from these motives will do a manifest and a final and continuing injustice to those who should be nearest and dearest to them. Your last will and testament, brethren, should be just and honest; it should be thought over in health, and the claims of kindred, of service, of obligation, carefully and fairly weighed.

You will ask me if you ought to remember the poor in your will. Sometimes doing this is the crowning meanness of a mean life. If you have given regularly and liberally to the poor, Sunday by Sunday, as the offertory came round, I can conceive your leaving in your will some final bequest to them, as the proper finish of a philanthropic life. But when a man has grudged every sixpence he ever gave (and these, his gifts, have been few and far between); when, even in cold winter weather, he can hardly be got to unbutton his pocket; and when, if he does give, it is with pain and reluctance; or when he will give from no real love of Christ's poor, but only to appear in a subscription list and to be thought as good as his neighbours—for such a man to leave a make-believe piece of charity in his will is the last effort of hypocrisy. So long as it cost him anything, so long as it needed self-denial to give alms, so long was he niggardly and backward; but, at last, when the gold is passing from him, when "my property" is just becoming a thing of the

past, then he will cheat his conscience into believing he is a charitable man, he will fling to the poor what he cannot keep, he will offer to God what costs him nothing. Of all hypocrisies, I fear the hypocrisy of leaving a large sum by will to the poor is often the grossest and the most deadly. If you desire to be charitable to the poor, be so now; do not put it off till death; be so as the habit of your life, and do not give but once in your career, and that when you can no longer retain it for your own use. If you are minded to give a large sum to the poor, do so while you can superintend the distribution of it; and remember that it is the fashion now-a-days, with legislatures and parliaments, not to pay attention to your will when you are dead, but to take and use your money, as they think fit, without regarding your dying feelings or intentions.

My dear brethren, do not be angry at my speaking in this homely fashion. Do not go away, and say we came expecting to hear the Gospel, and go back with a dissertation about making our wills. Surely I am preaching from my text, "Thus saith the Lord, set thine house in order for thou shalt die and not live." Surely I am not far from those evangelical words of the prophet, "What doth the Lord thy God require of thee but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." Surely I am not at issue with St. Paul, when he reasoned of righteousness, and temperance, and judgment to come. Is not this righteousness of life, this justice, this matter of good living, one grand side of the gospel? and is not one grand stumbling-block to the acceptance of the Gospel in the world, the fact