archbishops or metropolitans, who reside for the most part, likewise, in convents; then follow the Vartabeds or doctors, who are said to be well versed in the Old and New Testament and the doctrines of their Church; preaching is their exclusive calling.

The priests, who are married, but only once, are chosen by the congregations and receive tithes, perquisites and presents. Their priesthood has seven degrees, viz: priest, deacon, sub-deacon, torch-bearer, exorcist, reader aud janitor. In order to become priest, the candidate must be twenty-five years of age. They have many convents, all of the order of St. Basilius, from which the Vartabeds proceed.

The reports concerning the condition of the Armenian Church are, on the whole, unfavorable. To some protestant missionaries, who represented to an Armenian bishop, that it was the duty of the Armenian Church to labor for the conversion of the Turks, he is said to have replied: "What shall we preach to the Mohammedans? for they believe in the same God in which we believe, and love good prayers." The missionaries urged, that there was a great difference between Christianity and Islamism, and that the heaven of the Christian religion is infinitely purer than the paradise of the Mohammedans. Then the bishop replied: "I must tell you, what one of our Vartabeds once said to a Moslem: if I were sure that your paradise really existed, I should wish to be there." For several decades protestant missionaries have labored for the amelioration of the religious condition of the Armenians, and there are small Armenian protestant societies at Constantinople, Brusa, Trebizond, Erzroom, Aintab, Ada-Basar, Nicomedia and other places. Many evangelical Armenians have become missionaries amongst their countrymen. In Bebek, near Constantinople, there is a seminary for the education of Armenians, and many missionaries have been trained there already. It is true, the evangelical Armenians form as yet but a small minority, but there is reason to hope, that they will work like leaven amongst their country

men.

ART. VII.-EVERY MAN IS THE LORD'S IN DEATH: A DISCOURSE. BY DR. RAUCH.

"For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord's." Rom. 14: 8.

PART SECOND.*

I intend to prove to-day from the latter part of my text, 1. That the sinner, when he dies is the Lord's, and will be judged by Him; and

2. That the believer is the Lord's when he dies, though in a sense entirely different from that of the former.

First, then, I shall endeavor to prove that the sinner is the Lord's when he dies, although he does not acknowledge

it.

The whole life of man is enveloped in darkness, but its duration and its exit still more so. Whilst imagining himself the master and lord of his life, of his destiny, of his actions and plans, the sinner must nevertheless sooner or later experience, that, whatever he may undertake and complete during his life, in death he is no longer master of himself; or does any one of us know even when his last hour will approach; when he shall see for the last time the cheerful light of the sun, and enjoy for the last time the well known countenance of his friends and relatives on earth; when he shall part with the sweet habit of conversing with his acquaintances? His last hour is appointed in the councils of Him, that gave him life and existence, but he does not know it. The place whither he will be called; the circumstances under which, and the age of his life, when he must depart; all were determined upon before he was born, but he was not consulted and does not know them. Death approaches him unsuspectedly. Whilst in the midst of plans; whilst he, in his imagination and in the vigor of *For Part First see the April Number, 1859, p. 222.

health, calculates on enjoyments in after years; whilst his ever-blooming hopes urge his mind forward to enter new occupations, to engage in new schemes of activity, he is like the lamb that plays when the sun sets, but is sacrificed on the following morning. He lives and never thinks of death; he walks on the ashes of his departed friends and sees his own grave, but continues to act as if he should live forever. Proud mortal: you feel yourself a free, an active, a reasonable, a considerate being during life, but in that momentous hour, which your thoughts abhor, when you mast part with this world and enter another, you are no longer free, no longer active, no longer considerate. You feel yourself strong and full of invention and art, but that power, which calls you, you do not know whither, is invisible to your eye, and irresistible to your hand. You must follow its call, for you are not your own master; you must go into eternity, though you never think of it. No ties that you have formed on earth, no calls and claims, no wishes or tears, no strength, no designs can protect you from this invisible power: it beckons and without being consulted you must follow; it touches you and you sink a corpse. Are you not the servant of a higher master?

Who of us could or would deny the fact, that none of us is his own master in that mournful moment when at once, by one stroke, the blood ceases to circulate, the heart to beat, and the spirit of life to act; when the eye is sealed, the car deaf, and the limbs are cold; when friends, children, parents, sisters and brothers stand around the bed anxiously awaiting that life perhaps may return, that the eye may open, the heart beat again; when it seems impossible that he who a little before still felt, thought, acted, should be gone forever, that his soul should be separated by immense space from them and perhaps neither see their tears nor hear their sighs? Man is no longer his master in that mournful hour, when we follow his remains to the grave to inter them in the narrow and solitary house. From that hour silence, deep silence, reigns around his grave, and no sound reaches our ear from below the earth.

He has gone to the shores of eternity, without knowing the path; for he was the Lord's when he died and He led him. He was for us as long as he lived, now he is no more for us. His body begins to be changed and repels all the living from it, to prove that he is now under the law of a Being over whom he has no command, and that it is in vain. to weep and mourn whenever the face of man has disappeared.

- How well is this truth calculated to teach us that we are all the Lord's. Old and young; he whose head bends towards the earth, and he whose mind teems with hopes and expectation-all die without distinction. Every moment calls thousands into existence and sends thousands into the grave; and of those many thousands who dare say that he will not be one now or but a little hereafter? O let us live unto the Lord, that we may die unto him!

Dying, the sinner is the Lord's, though against his will and wishes. The materialist and the pantheist, the infidel and the sceptic, all are united in the wish, that when the soul leaves the body, it may be destroyed. Though they have the consent of all nations against them, yet their life, their character, their sensual will, can not endure the idea that the soul is the Lord's, and that IIe calls it when we die. As little as the insanity of many thousands can prove any thing against the generality of human reason, so little, it is true, should the arguments of a few materialists against the immortality of the soul be able to alarm us; it is, therefore, not on account of the believer, but on account of the sinner, that I have determined to review a few of their doubts and assertions.

And here I must allude, above all, to Pliny, the elder, whose learning was great, whose works were known among the ancients, and what is left of them excites even now our astonishment; yet his arguments for the annihilation of the soul are puerile and ridiculous. What he asks-is the soul good for without eyes and ears, if it can not smell nor taste? And where shall place enough be found for so many souls? Such arguments deserve certainly no refu

tation, and yet it is a fact, that can not be denied, that nearly all the reasons of the materialist essentially terminate in this puerile idea. The body, they say, the organ of the soul, conditions the life of the latter. On the strength and energy of our nerves and muscles depends that of our will and our thoughts; when they grow weak, our faculties grow dull, the memory fails, and the vigor of our judg ment diminishes; when we lose one of our limbs the soul is deprived of those sensations and perceptions which were obtained by impressions on the lost member; and when the whole body is destroyed, it follows that the soul will be extinguished like a light, since what is true of a part must be true also of the whole.

This is the highest point of the materialist's arguments, and whilst I am willing to admit, that the soul is so constituted that it is active through organs, and that it could not reach its destination independently of them, I must insist, at the same time, on the strictest distinction between a power that acts through organs and the organs themselves. The organs serve the soul and differ from it as the instrument on which the artist plays, differs from his art. When the organ is destroyed, the power that acted through it, remains still the same power, though its activity may seem to be impaired. That when our organs grow weak our memory and judgment grow dull, is but one part of our experience; the other is, that just in the moment of death the long lost faculties frequently obtain their youthful vigor anew; that the dying man can speak languages which he had forgotten; that all his faculties concentrated on one point, as if freed from all earthly chains, victoriously rise to a height which they never would have been able to reach in the time when muscles and nerves were strongest. When one of our organs suffers partial insanity takes place, says the materialist; but what this fact goes to prove he overlooks; the very insanity is a continuance of the activity of the soul which, though acting through organs, acts also independently of them. When a limb is lost the feelings and sensations the person had through