every man a liar;' and with gratitude let it be forever remembered, that the truth of God is inseparably connected with his mercy and love, his gracious promises, and his immutable benevolent designs; - designs and purposes, which embrace all mankind, for the accomplishment of which the truth and faithfulness of God and his almighty power are firmly pledged, and to which divine justice cannot be opposed; for Jehovah is 'a just God and a Saviour;' and he will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth' even the truth of their salvation.'

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The subject furnishes an apology, if any were necessary, for Universalist ministers, in relation to their peculiar style of preaching. They have been accused of usually choosing the most encouraging texts, and of dwelling, with great zeal and emphasis, upon the mercy and love of God, his infinite compassion, his tender regard for the human race, and the impartial and unchanging purposes of his grace. We believe they are often justly liable to the charge, and we wish they may never be less so; for these are divine principles and qualities to which, as we have seen, the truth of God is, by the inspired writers, particularly appropriated, and with which it is associated in a union never to be dissolved. Whereas, should they declare the terrors of divine and interminable wrath and never-ending punishment, they would teach for doctrines, the unauthorized opinions and traditions of men; doctrines with which the truth of God is never found united - to which its sacred seal is never affixed in all the Bible.

And are there any who are better pleased with the preaching of these latter doctrines, than with that of the former? Who are they? They can be none other than those described by St. Paul, who turn away their ears from the truth,' and who are turned into fables.' Shall we further quote the apostle's description, particularly of teachers of this character? 'For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women, ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith.' But, however withstood, opposed, or reproached, let not the ministers of 'grace and truth' be ashamed or afraid to preach the truth as it is in Jesus ;' but having themselves received mercy, let them not

faint, but by manifestation of the truth, commend themselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God;''in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth."

Appropriate to the subject is the following poetic fragment, with which we close the article:

'Whate'er your arts, ye powers of hell, suggest,
The truth of God undaunted I attest.
Produce your annals with insulting rage;
Bring forth your records, show the dreadful page,
One instance, where the Almighty fail'd his word,
Since first the race of men his name ador'd.

Confus'd, you search your dreadful rolls in vain ;
The eternal honor shines without a stain·
Unblemish'd shines, in men and angels' view;
Just are thy ways, thou King of saints, and true.'

M. R.

ART. XXVIII.

Funeral and Sepulchral Rites.

THE love of life is scarcely more natural, than the desire which every man feels of living in the memory of those he has left behind him, after he shall have passed off the stage of earthly existence. To die and be forgotten, to be blotted out from the book of human remembrance, to enter the shades of an eternal night, and not leave a single memorial to tell the world that we once were rejoicing like themselves in the light of the sun, is an idea at which the mind instinctively revolts, and which can find no abiding place, except in the bosom of the misanthropist. The sentiment, so prettily expressed by the bard, has more of poetry than philosophy or truth in it :

'Thus let me live, unseen, unknown,
Thus unlamented let me die, ·
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.'

I very much doubt whether there ever was a mind that could sympathize with the poet in this wish. The passion of vanity itself, which is bound up in the heart of man, precludes the adoption of a sentiment which would consign him to eternal oblivion. A feeling the very reverse of this, generally pervades the human mind, and to immortalize one's name, and render it eminently conspicuous in the temple of fame, has been an object, to attain which, ambition has driven her blood-stained car over bleeding millions of the human race, life has been sacrificed to toil and privation, and everything hazarded, the possession of which is valuable. The short period of existence which falls to us in the common allotment of nature, does not satisfy the mind; we seek to prolong it as far as possible, and therefore we desire, that after our bodies shall have returned to their original elements, we may still 'have a name to live,' and that that name 'shall flourish in immortal youth. Nor is this feeling merely selfish and confined exclusively to our own case. When the body is deposited in its narrow bed, when earth is committed to earth, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust,' and every attendant solemnity seems to assure us that a final separation has taken place, we cannot leave the hallowed spot where a beloved friend reposes, and with stoical indifference suffer every fond recollection, like letters written on the sand of the sea-shore, to be effaced by the first trivial occurrence that we meet with in life's journey. No; memory will hover over the spot of departed worth, and frequently shall affection lead its votary to revisit the tomb in which are the mortal remains of one so dearly cherished. We shall feel, (what will no less affect us, though it be the mere creature of fancy,) that we are discharging a debt of gratitude, and that his disembodied spirit receives the offering with pleasure. To the influence of such feelings as these, we may attribute the erection of the monumental brass, sacred to the memory of worth and virtue, or the more lasting strains of the poet, who has celebrated in immortal song the deeds of the brave and the virtues of the good. Nor let it be imagined that this effort to rescue from oblivion the names of the good and great, is without its use. The history thus handed down has excited emulation in many a bosom, and led the admirer of greatness to follow in the steps of him who has been the object of his admiration. While we are willing to confess that the proud mausoleum has often enshrined the ashes of

those whose greatest honor would have been never to have been remembered; and while we are forced to admit that the genius of poetry has been prostituted to eulogize those whose good deeds were never heard of till the epitaph told the 'lying tale ;' yet would we not, on account of these abuses, destroy a custom which has its foundation in feelings most honorable to human nature.

We

While we have been thus enabled to trace the origin of funeral and sepulchral honors to the very nature of the human mind, it cannot be of much importance to ascertain their origin as to the exact period when they were first instituted. They are probably coëxistent with the race of man. learn, however, from the remotest antiquity, that it was customary to keep from the polluting touch of strangers, the hallowed remains of the deceased. As early as the days of Abraham, we find that the patriarch purchased a spot of ground exclusively for himself and family, and we see his descendants travelling from the remote land of Egypt to inter their dead in the cave of Machpelah. Indeed the Jews, a people peculiar in everything, were in nothing more so, than in the rites of sepulture. No people, perhaps, derived more apparent and no doubt real consolation, than the Hebrews, from the reflexion that they would go down to the grave in peace, and sleep with their fathers. To be laid in the tomb in which reposed the bodies of their ancestors, often formed a part of their dying request; and this request was always granted and religiously complied with. The request of Jacob was of a peculiarly interesting character. Jehovah had promised the Israelites a deliverance from Egyptian bondage, and to give them the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession.' When Jacob was on his death bed, he thus addressed his weeping family: And he charged them and said unto them, I am to be gathered unto my people; bury me with my fathers in the cave which is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hittite, for a possession of a burying place. There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah. The purchase of the field and of the cave that is therein, was from the children of Heth. 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.' We can scarcely fail of noticing the particularity of this request, and of observing, at the same time, the anxious desire of being buried with his father, a desire which seemed to be nearest his heart amidst the agonies of dissolving nature. The knowledge of the importance which the Jews attached to the rites of sepulture, is not of inconsiderable utility in our perusal of the Scriptures. When we read the threatenings of the prophets and of our Saviour, that those unbelieving generations should be cast into Gehenna, and their bodies exposed openly to corruption, a prey to worms and fire, the casual reader sees nothing terrible in this, without transferring the scene to another world and spiritualizing the subject. He thinks it is a small thing' for a dead body to be thus exposed, since it is beyond the power of feeling. But the Jew did not reason thus. To him the idea of his bones bleaching in the valley, or his carcass being thrown promiscuously among the ignoble and malefactors, and left there to be devoured by worms or consumed by fire, was one at which every prejudice of his nature revolted. We doubt whether the common threatening of hell-fire affects the Christian with sensations so painful as the punishinent of Gehenna did the Jew. Let it not then be imagined that this was an idle threat which would be treated with neglect. On the Jew it would exert a powerful influence, and he would be as solicitous to shun it, as a citizen of this country would be to escape the gallows. The expectation of a shameful and ignominious death cannot be anticipated with stoic indifference.

If we turn to the Egyptians, we shall see their care and attention to the dead particularly striking. Their ingenuity in embalming the body, to keep the corporeal frame from decay, is too familiar to every reader, to demand further notice; and the lofty pyramids, the most durable of the works of man, raise their summits above the sands of the Lybian deserts, merely to serve as habitations and memorials for the dead.

Among the Greeks and Romans, nations which, in the zenith of their power, held the highest rank in intellectual attainments, and whose orators and poets will live as long as civilization shall find a resting-place on earth, the funeral rites held a distinguished place in their civil institutions. In Homer, we find particular accounts of the funeral honors paid to the shades