195 SERMON XXI. A Quiet Death-bed. GENESIS XLIX. 33. 66 AND WHEN JACOB HAD MADE AN END OF COMMANDING HIS SONS, HE GATHERED UP HIS FEET INTO THE BED, AND YIELDED UP THE GHOST, AND WAS GATHERED UNTO HIS PEOPLE." ERE we have an Old Testament death-bed scene; so naturally described, so full of pathos, so full of hope. Yet in Jacob's day, life and immortality had not been as yet brought to light by the death and resurrection of our Lord. I. This quiet death-bed contrasts forcibly with a sudden, or a violent death. Let us look at the contrast. In the Litany we pray "... from sudden death, good Lord, deliver us." Can you give any reason for such a deprecation? The Puritans, two hundred and fifty years ago, found great fault with this prayer, and wanted it expunging from the Prayer Book. Why do we still retain it? A sudden death is often one of God's modes of showing His wrath against the sinner. King Saul at Gilboa, Zimri and Cozbi in the plains of Moab, in the Old Testament; Ananias and Sapphira, in the New, will readily occur to our recollection as cases in point. A man in the heyday of life, perhaps in the very act of tyranny, or lying, or lust, is, by one stroke of God, dismissed from this world which he has abused, and sent to await in Hades the sentence of the judgment day. This sudden death vouches for the displeasure of God; it is the outward and visible sign of His unseen curse. But very often a sudden death is no special proof of God's anger; those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam feli and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt at Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay, says our Saviour. Sudden death is not necessarily a curse. In the profession of a soldier, of a sailor, of a miner, it is reckoned as one of the ordinary, and not one of the extraordinary risks to which a man's life is subject, and especially in the case of the soldier. But when you get outside such callings, it appears before us again in all its startling terror. A man is in the full career of life, like Spencer Perceval, once the Prime Minister of this country; he has the public cares of state, of army, and navy, of treaties, and of arrangements of all sorts upon his mind; this plan is just matured and ripe for execution; that scheme is being thoughtfully gone into, and is receiving the necessary modification and finishing touches before it is launched into Parliament; this is to be done to-night; that to-morrow morning. But the hand of the assassin lays him low by a sudden death, and all that was ripe, all that was but preparing, all that was only just thought of; public business, family arrangement, the private interview for the last time on this side the vail with His 1 Maker, all are cut short that instant. It is very well for Puritans to talk of sudden death being a boon; but as Churchmen, I think, we do better to include it in our prayer, that it will please Him to "Lead us not into temptation," but "save and defend us in all dangers ghostly and bodily." And if this be so to the sufferer himself, there can be, I think, little doubt as to its bearing on the survivors. Perhaps it has been your duty once or twice to have to break such news to some near relation; you know the distress it causes; to think that no last farewell, no last thoughtful commission, no last little orders could be given; but that all has abruptly terminated, like a painting half done, colours, brushes, pallette, all lying about it in confusion. But if it so happen that the man who dies thus suddenly has been an unmethodical, dilatory, unbusinesslike man, what trouble he leaves to those who come after him; what injustice he sometimes so inflicts upon his nearest kin! The Lord said to Hezekiah, "Set thine house in order : for thou shalt die, and not live." "Set thine house in order," for life is so short, and uncertain. Seeing that sudden death may occur to us all, this is a duty we ought not to neglect. But even if a man's death should come upon him anything but suddenly, it is surprising how sometimes he will neglect this duty. There is nothing which many men so much dislike as to be told that the hour will certainly soon be here, when they personally must quit this world. Doctor, clergyman, nurse, friends, all may notice that the strides of weakness or of disease are coming on apace; but the man himself refuses to recognize it; and though he will tell you with the greatest 1 : earnestness that all men are mortal; yet the slightest hint to him that his own hour is at hand, he resents as a personal insult, and will not tolerate with equanimity to be told of his own approaching dissolution. Then, perhaps, when the matter has gone so far that even he cannot disguise from himself the fatal symptoms, all in a hurry he sends for the lawyer, or perhaps tries to make his will himself but the calm reason, the sound sober judgment has begun to totter, or languor and lassitude, or the violence of pain is so great, that not much can be done. A hasty signature is given to a few ill-considered sentences; and the result is perhaps that children and friends, and servants, and dependents are not justly treated by the dying man; that poor relations, aged perhaps, crippled perhaps, or infirm, are cruelly passed over, and through the haste to get all done in time, perhaps there is some miserable flaw in the wording of the document which lands the executors in a law-suit soon after his funeral, which cuts off, by its expenses, a good slice from the estate. II. Now in all this account of the closing scene of Jacob's life, I notice no confusion, no hurry; but the calm patriarch in a serene old age looks round his family, looks over his estate, looks firmly forward to death; winds up all the threads of a long life, then gathers his feet up into the bed, and so yields up the ghost. I regard this as the death-bed of a man whom God has blest. Jacob's life was a chequered one. But he, like David, seems to have been one in whom the faults of youth and middle life were toned down in age, a man in whom the education of the grace of God is distinctly seen as year after year of his life rolls by. "The He is now tired of life. Seventeen years before this, when he was first presented to Pharoah, he says, days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years; few and evil have the days of the years of my life been, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers, in the days of their pilgrimage." But old age has by this time, seventeen years later, made further ravages upon a naturally strong constitution; his eyes are dim for age, so that he cannot see; he becomes sick he bows himself upon the bed's head; he has to lean upon the top of his staff. Still in the midst of all these : physical disadvantages, he prepares with the greatest selfpossession for the closing act. He knows that death is at hand, and, we read, Jacob called his sons, and said, "Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the last days." He had just blessed Joseph with special blessings, giving him a double portion among his brethren-one portion for Ephraim his younger, and one for Manasseh his elder son; and now the weird spirit of prophecy comes over him in its might; he is rapt; and pours out in poetic language what are to be the blessings, and what the fortunes of the families of his twelve sons. The incestuous Reuben is dethroned from his primogeniture; the manslayers, Simeon and Levi, are scattered among the other tribes; the noble Judah is designated as he from whom Messiah shall come, and as the tribe which should alone remain to the end, the nucleus of the people at their restoration from captivity "to him shall the gathering of the people be;" Naphthali from whose territory hereafter the twelve apostles of the Gospel were to come-" is a hind let |