developes the energies of life, or helps the progress of decay. It is
a great power in the hot-house, a great power also in the coffin; it
expands the leaf, matures the fruit, adds precocious vigour to
vegetable life: and warmth too developes, with tenfold rapidity, the
weltering process of dissolution. So too with sorrow. There are
spirits in which it developes the seminal principle of life; there are
others in which it prematurely hastens the consummation of irreparable
decay. Our subject therefore is the twofold power of sorrow.

I. The fatal power of the sorrow of the world.
II. The life-giving power of the sorrow that is after God.

The simplest way in which the sorrow of the world works death, is seen
in the effect of mere regret for worldly loss. There are certain
advantages with which we come into the world. Youth, health, friends,
and sometimes property. So long as these are continued we are happy;
and because happy, fancy ourselves very grateful to God. We bask in
the sunshine of His gifts, and this pleasant sensation of sunning
ourselves in life we call religion; that state in which we all are
before sorrow comes, to test the temper of the metal of which our
souls are made, when the spirits are unbroken and the heart buoyant,
when a fresh morning is to a young heart what it is to the skylark.
The exuberant burst of joy seems a spontaneous hymn to the Father of
all blessing, like the matin carol of the bird; but this is not
religion: it is the instinctive utterance of happy feeling, having as
little of moral character in it, in the happy human being, as in the
happy bird.

Nay more--the religion which is only sunned into being by happiness,
is a suspicious thing: having been warmed by joy, it will become cold
when joy is over; and then when these blessings are removed, we count
ourselves hardly treated, as if we had been defrauded of a right;
rebellious hard feelings come; then it is you see people become
bitter, spiteful, discontented. At every step in the solemn path of
life, something must be mourned which will come back no more; the
temper that was so smooth becomes rugged and uneven; the benevolence
that expanded upon all, narrows into an ever dwindling selfishness--we
are alone; and then that death-like loneliness deepens as life goes
on. The course of man is downwards, and he moves with slow and ever
more solitary steps, down to the dark silence--the silence of