trated at the bed-side of Jairus' daughter. Well did that noisy,
lamenting group represent the worldly who read only the material fact,
or that flippant skepticism which laughs all supernatural truth to
scorn. And well did Jesus represent the spirit of his doctrine, and its
transforming power, when he exclaimed, "She is not dead, but sleepeth."

Yes! beautifully has Christianity transformed death. To the eye of flesh
it was the final direction of our fate,--the consummate riddle in this
mystery of being,--the wreck of all our hopes,--

"The simple senses crowned his head,
Omega! thou art Lord, they said;
We find no motion in the dead."

Ever, though with higher desires and better gleamings, the mind has
struggled and sunk before this fact of decay, and this awful silence of
nature; while in the waning light of the soul, and among the ashes of
the sepulchre, skepticism has built its dreary negation. And though the
mother could lay down her child without taking hints which God gave her
from every little flower that sprung on that grassy bed,--though the
unexhausted intellect has reasoned that we ought to live again, and
the affections, more oracular, swelling with the nature of their great
source, have prophesied that we shall,--never, until the revelation
of Christ descended into our souls, and illuminated all our spiritual
vision, have we been able to say certainly of death, it is a sleep.
This has made its outward semblance not that of cessation, but of
progression--not an end, but a change--converting its rocky couch to a
birth-chamber, over-casting its shadows with beams of eternal morning,
while behind its cold unconsciousness the unseen spirit broods into
higher life. "He fell asleep," says the sacred chronicler, speaking
of bloody Stephen. "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth," said Christ to his
disciples; and yet again, as here in the text, the beautiful synonyme is
repeated, "She is not dead, but sleepeth."

But I proceed to remark, if the Christian religion thus transforms
death, or, in other words, abolishes the idea of its being annihilation,
or an end, then it gives us a new view of our relations to the departed.
What are these relations? The answers to this question will form the
burden of the present discourse.

I. There is the relation of memory. It is true, we may argue that
this relation exists whether the Christian view of death be correct or
not;--so long have those who are now go