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but authoritative voice of Him who was acquainted with grief: "Why make ye all this ado and weep? the damsel is not dead, but sleepeth."

Enough has been said, my brethren, to justify the assertion, that the house of mourning is the best school which we can frequent, if we wish our hearts to be really improved, and to learn our duty either to God or man. Our duty to man we shall find to consist in kind attentions and brotherly love, which surely the view of his sufferings is of all things the best adapted to call forth. And how can we better learn our duty to God, than in contemplating the striking instances of his power exhibited in the fate of man, and in lifting our thoughts to those higher views which open amid the shades of death? How can we better learn that humble acquiescence in his providence, which becomes our frail and feeble condition; or the necessity for that obedience to his will, by which alone our hope and faith can be invigorated and confirmed?

'SERMON XX.

ON RELIGIOUS CONSOLATION IN AFFLICTION, EXEMPLIFIED IN THE CASE OF THE DEATH OF CHILDREN.

MATTHEW, ii. 18.

"In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning; Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they

are not."

THESE words, my brethren, of the prophet Jeremiah, are applied, as you know, by the holy evangelist, to that very extraordinary and horrible incident which he relates in this chapter: the massacre of the young children, perpetrated by Herod, in the hope that the infant king of the Jews would thus be sacrificed to his jealous fury. In this expectation he was disappointed by the overruling hand of Providence; and we who, in a distant age and country, meet at this day for the purposes of religion, in the name of the Child who was then spared, know, I trust, in what manner to value and to adore that watchful goodness, which, while it permitted the hearts of the mothers of Bethlehem to bleed, was yet laying firm, for all future generations of men, the foun

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dation of their happiness and their hopes. To such extensive views of divine Providence, it is the delight of religion to conduct the serious mind, and to clothe, with a mantle of celestial light, the most melancholy appearances which this lower world exhibits. In the first instance, indeed, nature fixes our thoughts on the appearances alone; and when, as in the incident before us, we read of the mandate which the tyrant "sent forth to slay all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under," we can, for a time, listen to no voice, except that which long before had resounded in the ears of the prophet, "the voice of lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning; Rachel weeping for her children, and refusing to be comforted."

In the hour in which I speak*, my brethren, such a voice, I fear, is but too frequent in the houses of our city; and many a tear is now falling from the eyes of parents over the lifeless remains of infant innocence and beauty. The same God, who, on one memorable occasion, permitted a bloody tyrant to be the minister of his inscrutable designs, in the destruction of holy innocents, more frequently sends disease among the young of his people; and, year after year, as at the present hour, many a spotless soul returns to him, untried by the dangers, and unpolluted by the sins of that earthly course on which it had begun to enter. It is an hour in which even religion must for a time be still, and listen, with sacred respect, to the voice of nature, which,

February, 1808, when the disease of the measles was fatally prevalent.

even in its excesses of "lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning," is yet the voice of God in the human heart. When she may speak, however, Religion can utter the words of consolation; and it is her office to seize upon those hours when the hearts of some are broken with affliction, and when many are trembling with apprehension, and to press those lessons of wisdom, which are heard too often with indifference, in the pride and the gaiety of common life.

The sentiment expressed in the text, my brethren, accords with the feelings of human nature. The death of young children excites, perhaps, more " lamentation and great mourning" than any other incident in the course of mortality. To those who are not parents, a dispensation of this kind may seem, perhaps, of a much less afflicting nature than many others. A child is but an insignificant object in the eye of the world, and seems but a trifling loss to society. To a parent, however, those very circumstances, which render his child of little value to others, are the most attractive. It is his delight to retire from the serious cares and busy occupations of men into the unanxious scenes of childish playfulness; to repose his thoughts upon some countenances on which the world has left no traces of care, and vice has impressed no marks of disorder; and to find within his own house, and sprung from his own loins, some forms which recal the image of primæval innocence, and anticipate the society of heaven. When these innocent beings are torn from us, we suffer a calamity with which a stranger, indeed, will imperfectly sympathize, but of which the heart knoweth the bitterness; and the sorrow may only be the deeper, and more

heartfelt, that it must be disguised and smothered from an unpitying world.

The death of a young person, advanced to years of maturity, occasions a general sympathy. The grief of parents is then at once felt and understood. When talents, which gave the promise of future distinction, and virtues, to which the declining years of a parent clung for support, are torn from the domestic circle which they blessed and adorned, there are few hearts so much closed to a fellow-feeling with human calamity, as not to be powerfully affected with such circumstances of deep distress. But this very sympathy of mankind is a source of consolation which alleviates the affliction by which it is occasioned. The sorrow excited by the death of a young child may often be as acute, but it is attended with much less sympathy. Here, too, parents have formed hopes which are only, perhaps, the greater and more unbounded, inasmuch as the foundation on which they rest is less certain and definite. These hopes are frustrated for ever; their child is as if he had never been; even his memory has disappeared from every heart but their own; and they cherish it with the deeper feeling, that there is no other breast in which it dwells.

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To such sorrows of the heart, my brethren, it is the office of Religion to apply the words of consolation; and when the first tumults of grief are at an end, to inspire the soul of the mourner with loftier sentiments. suggests, in the first place, that, in the kingdom of God, there is no loss of existence; that the hand of infinite wisdom changes, indeed, the sphere of action in which the rational soul is destined to move, but never

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