there is a very different view of things; but as to what respects the world we have reason to say as the Psalmist does, Verily, every man at his best estate is altogether vanity, Psal. xxxix. 5. We may see the vanity of all those honours and carnal pleasures which many pursue with so much eagerness, as though they had nothing else to mind, nothing to make provision for but the flesh, which they do at the expence of that which is in itself most excellent and desirable: We may also infer, 2. That this affords an undeniable and universal motive to humility; since death knows no distinction of persons, regards the rich no more than the poor; puts no mark of distinction between the remains of a prince and a peasant; and not only takes away every thing that men value themselves upon, but levels the highest part of mankind with common dust: They who boast of their extract, descent, and kindred, are obliged, with Job, to say, to corruption, Thou art my father; to the worm, Thou art my mother and my sister, Job xvii. 14. Shall we be proud of our habitations, who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust? chap. iv. 19. Are any proud of their youth and beauty? this is, at best, but like a flower that does not abide long in its bloom, and when cut down, it withers. The finest features are not only spoiled by death, but rendered unpleasant and ghastly to behold; and accordingly are removed out of sight, and laid in the grave. 3. From the consideration of man's liableness to death, and those diseases that lead to it, as the wages of sin, we may infer; that sin is a bitter and formidable evil. The cause is to be judged of by its effects. As death, accompanied with all those diseases which are the forerunners of it, is the greatest natural evil that we are liable to; sin, from whence it took its rise, must be the greatest moral evil; we should never reflect on the one without lying low before God in a sense of the other. The Psalmist, when meditating on his own mortality, traces it to the spring thereof; and ascribes it to those rebukes with which God corrects men for their iniquities, that they die, and their beauty consumes away like a moth, Psal. xxxix. 11. And elsewhere, when he compares the life of man to the grass, which in the morning flourisheth, and groweth up; and in the evening is cut down and withereth, he immediately adds; thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance, Psal. xc. 6, 8. And when Hezekiah had an intimation of his recovery, after he had the sentence of death within himself, he speaks of his deliverance from the pit of corruption, Isa. xxxviii. 17. as that which was accompanied with God's casting all his sins behind his back. And since we cannot be delivered from these sad effects of sin, till the frame of nature is dissolved, and afterwards rebuilt; it should put us upon using those proper methods whereby we may be freed from the guilt and dominion thereof; and accordingly it should have a tendency to promote a life of holiness in us. 4. From the uncertainty of life, let us be induced to improve our present time, and endeavour so to live, as that, when God calls us hence, we may be ready. And therefore, we ought to pray with the Psalmist, So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom, Psal. xc. 12. that by this means, that which deprives us of all earthly enjoyments, may give us an admission into a better world, and be the gate to eternal life. This leads us to consider, II. That death has a sting and curse annexed to it, with respect to some. Thus the apostle expressly says, The sting of death is sin, 1 Cor. xv. 56. As sin at first brought death into the world; so it is the guilt thereof, lying on the consciences of men, which is the principal thing that makes them afraid to leave the world; not but that death is, in itself, an evil that nature cannot think of without some reluctancy. And there-fore the apostle Paul, although he expresses that assurance which he had of happiness in another world, which he groaned after, and earnestly longed to be possessed of; yet had it been put to his choice, he would have wished that he could have been clothed upon with the house which is from heaven, 2 Cor. v. 2. that is, had it been the will of God, that he might have been brought to heaven without going the way of all the earth, this would have been more agreeable to nature. But when the two evils of death meet together, namely, that which is abhorrent to nature, and the sting which makes it much more formidable, this is, beyond measure, distressing. In this answer, the sting and curse of death are both put together, as implying the same thing. Accordingly, it is that whereby a person apprehends himself liable to the condemning sentence of the law, separated from God, and excluded from his favour, so that death ap pears to him to be the beginning of sorrows; this is that which tends to embitter it, and fills him with dread and horror at the thoughts of it. Which leads us, III. To shew that it is the peculiar privilege of the righteous, that though they shall not be delivered from death, yet this shall redound to their advantage. That they shall not be exempted from death is evident; because the decree of God relating hereunto, extends to all men. We read, indeed, of two that escaped the grave, viz. Enoch, who was translated that he should not see death, and Elijah, who was carried to heaven in a fiery chariot; but these are extraordinary instances, not designed as precedents, by which we may judge of the common lot of believers. And the saints that shall be found VOL. III. P p alive at Christ's second coming, shall undergo a change, as 1. That the sting of death is taken away from them. This is the result of their being in a justified state; for since a person's being liable to the condemning sentence of the law is the principal thing that has a tendency to make him uneasy, and may be truly called the sting that wounds the conscience; so a sense of his interest in forgiveness through the blood of Christ, tends to give peace to it; such an one can say, who shall lay any thing to my charge? It is God that justifieth; or though I have contracted guilt, which renders me unworthy of his favour; yet I am persuaded that this guilt is removed; and therefore iniquity shall not be my ruin; and even death itself shall bring me to the possession of those blessings that were purchased for me by the blood of Christ, which I have been enabled to apply to myself by faith; and with this confidence he can say with the apostle, O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? 1 Cor. xv. 55. 2. Their dying is an instance of God's love to them. As those whom Christ is said to have loved in the world, he loved unto the end of his life; so he loves them to the end of theirs, John xiii. 1. And as nothing has hitherto separated them from this love, nothing shall be able to do it. There are three instances wherein the love of God to dying believers discovers itself. (1.) In that they are hereby freed from sin and misery; this they never were, nor can be till then. As for sin, there are the remainders thereof in the best of men, which give them great disturbance, and occasion for that daily conflict which there is between flesh and spirit, as has been before observed. But at death the conflict will be at an end, and the victory which they shall obtain over it, compleat. There shall be no law in the members warring against the law of the mind; no propensity or inclination to what is evil; nor any guilt or defilement con * See more of this in Quest, Ixxxvii. tracted; which would be inconsistent with a state of perfect holiness. And as it is a state of perfect happiness, there is an entire freedom from all those miseries which sin brought into this lower world. These are either internal or external, personal or relative; none of which shall occur to allay, or give any disturbance to the saints' blessedness after death. But more of this will be considered under a following answer; in which we shall be led to speak of the happiness of the righteous at the day of judgment, both in soul and body *; and therefore we proceed to consider, (2.) That the death of a believer appears to be an instance of divine love, in that hereby he is made capable of farther communion with Christ in glory. Persons must be made meet for heaven before they are admitted to it. Though our present season and day of grace is a time in which God is training his people up for glory; and there is an habitual preparation for it, when the work of grace is begun; which is what the apostle intends when he speaks of some who are made meet to be made partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light, Col. ii. 12. when they were first translated into Christ's kingdom: nevertheless this falls very short of that actual meetness which the saints must have when they are brought to the possession of the heavenly blessedness. Then they shall be made perfect in holiness, as will be observed in the next answer; otherwise there can be no perfect happiness. And besides this, the soul must be more enlarged, that hereby it may be enabled to receive the immediate discoveries of the divine glory, or to converse with the heavenly inhabitants, than it can be here. The frame of nature must be changed; which is what the apostle intends, when he says, Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, neither doth corruption inherit incorruption, 1 Cor. xv. 50. accordingly he adds, ver. 53. This corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality; whereby he intimates, that frail, mortal, and corruptible man, is not able to bear that glory which is reserved for a state of immortality. Therefore the soul must be so changed as to be rendered receptive thereof; and in order thereto, all its powers and faculties must be greatly enlarged; otherwise it can no more receive the immediate rays of the divine glory, than the weak and distempered eye can look steady on the sun shining in its meridian brightness. In this world our ideas of divine things are very imperfect, by reason of the narrowness of our capacities, and God condescends to reveal himself to us in proportion thereto; but when the saints shall see him as he is, or have a perfect and immediate vision and fruition of his glory, they shall be made recep • See Quest, XC. tive of it; this is done at death; whereby they are rendered capable of farther communion with Christ in glory. (a) (a) The belief of a separate state is very ancient. Cicero and Seneca have asserted, that all nations believed the immortality of the soul. Yet we know there were not only individuals, but sects who were exceptions. Saul the first king of Israel believed that the soul survived the death of the body, or he would neither have made laws against necromancers, nor have applied to one in bis distresses. If Samuel was raised, it is a fact, directly in point, but the words though express, are probably an accommodation to the sentiments of men. The son of Sirach who lived two hundred years before Christ, says that Samuel prophesied after he was dead. (Ecclus. c. 46. v. 20.) And Josephus in his account of the life of Saul, shows his belief to be that Samuel actually arose. The saine fears of apparitions which the disciples had, still exist with the common people, and are proofs that they entertain the same sentiment. Some of the Pharisees, who are represented as believing a separate state, thought souls might return to other bodies. This was the opinion of Josephus with respect to the virtuous; and also of those Jews, who supposed that Jesus was Elijah or Jeremiah; but the question of the disciples, whether a man had been born blind for his own sins, implies a possibility of a return also of the wicked into other bodies. Nevertheless the prevailing opinion of the Pharisees was of a separate state; otherwise Paul's professing their sentiments, which must have been known to him, was disingenuous; nor, if they had known the difference, would they have protected him. The approbation of the multitude when he proved the doctrine from the words of Jehovah to Moses at the bush, (Matt. xxii. 32.) and the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, evince that the common opinion was such. This subject, has been enlightened, not first brought to light, through the Gospel, but plainly asserted; this day shalt thou be with me in paradise. At home in the body, and absent from the Lord, absent from the body, and present with the Lord, is descriptive but of two states. The desire to depart to be with Christ, shows an immediate expectation. And otherwise it cannot be said that the spirits of just men are made perfect. The Jews, Greeks, and Romans assigned the Heaven to the gods, earth to men, and under the earth (18, adus, inferi) to the dead. The passages "the spirit shall return to God," and "the spirit of a man goeth upwards" are not exceptions, for then they would prove that the evil, as well as the good, went to heaven. That the spirit is disposed of by God, and that the spirit of a man survives the death of the body, seem to be all that is respectively implied. Samuel was believed to come out of, and return to his place under the earth; and Saul was to be with him, below the earth; but, possibly, in a different apartment. Thus Abraham and Lazarus were in sight of, and only divided from the man in torments by a gulph. Under the gospel the place of separate saints is represented to be in Heaven. Heaven had been always assigned to God among the Jews, and even the heathens thought it the most honourable place: Virgil assigned it to Cæsar. Jesus declared he came from thence, and would return thither; and for the comfort of his disciples, told them, he would prepare a place for them, and take them to himself. They saw him actually ascend. He is to come from thence, and to bring them with him to judgment. This change of representation implies no contradiction, for pure spirits are not confined to place. Our souls are connected with our bodies, and therefore go and come with, or rather in them. But when the conexion is broken, the soul cannot be said to be in one place more than another, except as it is occupied with material objects. It can attend to one thing only at once, and therefore when in, it cannot be out of the body, and must be wherever occupied, but not in any place, except concerned with material objects. The infinite Spirit had no connexion with space in all the eternity which preceded creation; since time began |