CONTENTS OF VOL. XIX. PAGE CCCLXXXVIII.—The Approach of Death......By Rev. Erskine Mason, D.D., CCCLXXXIX.--The Ministration of the Spirit..By Rev. David Magle, D.D., CCCXC.—The Duties which the Members of the Church owe to each other, By Rev. Thos. H. Skinner, D.D., CCCXCII.-Mistakes in Education....... CCCXCIII.-The Lord Departed.............. CCCXCIV.-Stability in the Christian Church.....By Rev. Noah Porter, D.D., 97 By Richard S. Storrs, D.D., CCCCI.-A Revival of Religion, God's Work.... By Rev. Mark Tucker, D.D. CCCCII.-Providence and its Teachings....... By Rev. Saml. W. Fisher, CCCCIII-God's Providence in the late Fire......By Rev. Jos. P. Thompson, 169 CCCCIV.--On the Death of General Jackson... .By Rev. Thos. Brainard, 179 CCCCV...The Magnitude of the Ministerial Work.......By Rev. E. Thurston, 193 CCCCV--Growth in Knowledge and Grace....By Rev. Elipha White, D.D. CCCCVII.-Burdens to be cast upon the Lord..By Rev. Mark Hopkins, D.D., PASTOR OF THE BLEECKER STREET PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEW YORK. THE APPROACH OF DEATH A NEW YEAR'S SERMON. "Behold I come quickly."- -REVELATIONS iii. 11. (First clause.) THE hopes, my brethren, which belong to you on the first Sabbath of a New Year, do not contemplate for yourselves a greater good than do the wishes of him who now addresses you. The object of your hopes, may indeed be different from that which my wishes for you respect, but I am sure that you will not compare them, in point of intrinsic worth, or in regard to the certainty and permanency which characterize them re spectively. The state of the human mind, at a season like the present, for the most part, one of expectation. We have done with the concerns of the old year, and we are awaiting the development of a new one; and turning down the page upon which our previous history has been written, and the lessons of experience have been recorded, we are giving licence to imagination to fill up the sheet upon which reality has not yet traced a letter. I am not wrong in supposing, that this page of the future, as it now appears to us, is full of scenes of joy; or, if in any case fear predominates over hope, the faint lines in which it traces, its object, and the very undecided shading which it throws over it, stand in very strong contrast to the bold strokes, with which hope paints its visions, and the bright colors in which it sets them. It is a scene of earthly joy which our imagination is describing. We are filling up the prospect of the coming year with hours of comfort and peace, and with days of prosperity. There are no clouds about that earthly horizon, as hope presents it; and an imagination under the tutelage of hope troubles us with no dreams of coming sorrow, anxiety or painful changes. Now, my brethren, it cannot be denied that there is a degree of pleasure connected with many of those mental hallucinations to which men are exposed, during which reason is dethroned, and yet we always pity their subject as wholly unfitted, as well for the duties as the joys of real life; and who cannot see that however delightful to the m'nd may be the visions of a deceitful hope, there is an evil connected with its uncontrolled influence? Who cannot see that it must unfit us to meet any of those changes, those thousand nameless contingencies, which sober reason tells us must help to make up the future, as they have furnished the materials of the history of the past. Who, at least, cannot see its vanity, in view of one great event which we know to be certain, and which, yet, we are apt to throw entirely out of all our calculations? And, if I call your attention to that event to-day, it is only to render effective my wishes for your good. If I throw upon the canvass before you, in strong colors, death, in some of its most interesting associations, it is because that is an event whose certainty no earthly hope can destroy, whose rapidly approaching steps it cannot cause to linger, though it may tend to unfit us wholly for its experience. It is, then, with a view of preparing you for a higher, nobler, greater good, than any which your most rational, enlarged and sanguine earthly hopes contemplate, that I call you to-day to ponder, for a few moments, the message which the Son of God sends to each one of us-"Behold I come quickly," If the influence cf the theme is salutary, we will dwell upon it, though its relations may be painful; if the draught which our physician mingles for us gives us the promise of returning health, we will drink it however bitter or nauseous it may be to the taste. My subject, then, this morning, is death-and my object is to set it before you, in some of those aspects and associations which belong to it, and in the light of which it is calculated to exert a healthful moral influence over the mind. It is far from my purpose, my brethren, to endeavor to establish the proposition that we must die-I would not insult your understanding by such an argument-are you not every day treading upon the dust of generations who have gone before you? Have you in your minds no remembrance and on your persons no emblems of mourning for friends whose eyes your own hands have closed? Has not disease already more than once shattered your own frames, and made you sigh over the |