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pense-the grief of parting-the funeral, the burial, the return to the desolate home. The Gospel brightens the prospects in the future. Their little forms will spring from the dust, incorruptible and glorious. Death cannot always hold its prey. The mouldering dust is safely guarded by the Redeemer, until He shall reconstruct it after the image of His own glorified body.

Let us open our Bible, and listen to all the Lord our God will say. May the Holy Spirit guide us into the full truth. Then, amid the tears of grief, Jehovah's sunshine will rest upon the soul. We will enjoy the sweetness of our Father's smile. We will learn more of the fullness of His love, and will bless our gracious Saviour, because by faith we can see Him embrace our babes, and smile upon the sinless immortals as they encircle His throne.

IV.

The Curse.

"Sin with its dreadful impress marks our race,
In every form its ravages we trace;
From earliest life to hoary age,

The fell destroyer vents his fiercest rage:
All, all must die."

By referring to Chapter II, you will see many questions which agitated my heart during the night of my first anguish. Among them this one: Why do infants die? One half of the human family die before they reach their fifth year. Like dew-drops they sparkle; like them, they disappear. What finite mind can adequately conceive the intense suffering this mortality inflicts upon the hearts of human families! But though so transient their visit, no reflecting mind will say they were created in vain. The flower that fades in its early bloom, the bud that is broken in

its beauty, the dew-drop that sparkles in the flower-cup, the evanescent rainbow-are they useless? Do these, do all the transitory things of life answer no wise purpose? Then the babe that lingers but for a day before it floats away to the pearly strand, had some mission to fulfill. Its brief life left an ineffaceable mark. The very sufferings its departure occasioned, fulfilled some deep design.

But their death. Death is one of the profoundest mysteries of nature; the death of infants the profoundest mystery of death. The only light we possess upon the subject is found in the Bible. There we read the general proposition, "It is appointed unto all men once to die." From this decree there is no escape. No exception is made in favor of youth, beauty, or blood. Every individual, from the child an hour old to the man of a hundred years, is under the sentence of death.

in the grave.

All must lie down

Some, seeking to be wise above what is written, and to prevent what transpires, maintain that no infant ought to die. They teach

that God never created a babe to live only a few days or years-that all who are born should live, casualties excepted, to a ripe old age. The inference is, that in the matter of their death God has no agency. The constant occurrence of the fact they must account for. And in the solution they seek to extinguish the idea of the overruling providence of God. They tell you that the child is born with hereditary disease-that life is so feeble that it can not counteract the diseased constitution entailed; and hence must yield to the rapid decay of organized matter. The fact assigned may in, perhaps, most cases, be a sufficient physical reason why an infant dies. Observation modifies this general statement. Some babes with a constitution the most robust die. But if this solution were invariably true, they ought not. Others in whom the powers of life scarcely exert themselves, survive the perils of infancy and childhood, and live long enough to accomplish great good, or great evil in the world. But we inquire, Whence sprang this family constitution?

Did not the All-wise

Creator, without consulting any of His creatures, without their consent or their knowledge, even before the creation of the original pair, ordain the hereditary system? Did He not so constitute the human race that, in the divine administration of its successive generations, He could "visit the iniquities of the father upon the children?" And in this visitation, is not temporal death involved-as in the destruction of the cities of the Plain? In this visitation He has His eye upon the parent, as the original offender, and acts toward him as a Judge. To the child He acts as Lord. He will abundantly compensate it. It is well, everlastingly well with it. In its death it is the parent that dies. "For us they languish, and for us they die." To the parent its death may be an evidence of the divine displeasure against him for his sin. Now if God has so constituted the human family, when in His sovereign pleasure He sees best to fulfil this threatening, can He not so permit, arrange, or control events, that the child will be born with a constitution so feeble, that it can not long survive?

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