goodness, how much of the haven should we have in our voyage, how much of home in our pilgrimage, how much of heaven in this wretched earth! Friends,

throw away your staves, break the arm of flesh, lie down here quietly in every dispensation, and you shall see the salvation of God."

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LECTURE XII.

GENESIS XXv. 8.

"THEN ABRAHAM GAVE UP THE GHOST, AND DIED IN A GOOD OLD AGE, AN OLD MAN, AND FULL OF YEARS; AND WAS GATHERED TO HIS PEOPLE."

WE this morning arrive at the conclusion of the history in which we have now for some time past been engaged, and desire to offer our sincere and hearty thanksgivings to Almighty God for such a measure of divine assistance as He has been mercifully pleased to supply. The closing years of life are usually not unaccompanied by warnings or by trials. The companions of our youth, the friends of our maturer age, the near connexions who have gladdened life, and the beloved relatives who have endeared it, fall

around us, and they who live to approach the scriptural limit of the days of the years of man, often find themselves, even amongst the thickest throngs of earth, solitary and deserted, their contemporaries removed, while they themselves remain as the "shaking of the olive-tree or the gleanings of grapes when the vintage is done."

The patriarch who forms the subject of our history, was not exempted from these trials which mingle in the common lot of all mortality. At the opening of the 23d chapter, we read of the death of his beloved wife Sarah, with whom he had enjoyed a remarkable degree of peace and happiness, during a longer period than that of which a whole life, at the present day, usually consists. Yet, long as this delightful relationship had been permitted to continue, it was now drawn to a close, and Sarah was removed to that blessed world, "where they neither marry, nor are given in marriage."

There is something in the breaking of this tie more affecting perhaps to the human heart than in the disruption of any other which unites us to our fellow pilgrims in our passage through this world of sorrow; perhaps because the tie itself, when existing between the children of God, is the sweetest and most valuable, as well as the most ancient which God has appointed in the world; having been, as our Church truly declares, "instituted of God in the time of man's innocency," before he had been ruined by transgression, and debased by sin; "signifying unto us the mystical union between Christ and his Church," a peculiarly beautiful feature in the marriage tie, and which gives it a remarkable precedency over all others.

Abraham had by the good providence of God, enjoyed this state under its most auspicious aspect, and deeply indeed does he appear to have felt its termination; for we are told, and it is the only instance

in which the mourning for a wife is recorded in the history of the patriarchs, that he came "to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her." Sarah is always spoken of in Scripture, as the pattern of conjugal fidelity and love: her example is held forth by the apostle as the highest model for Christian women, and the title of

her daughters," as their most honourable distinction. The very fact, that so few of the incidents of her history are recorded speak strongly in her favour, for there is little in the even tenour of female life, when that life is passed in the unobtrusive and noiseless path of devotedness to God, and in the peaceful round of domestic duties, which can, or ought to form the subject of the chronicler. The very privacy of the Christian graces, manifested in such a walk and conversation, endears them the more to the few who have the opportunity of intimately knowing their value, and daily