rds of Christ,
"Be ye also ready." (Matt. xxiv. 44.) They are gone, and we are going;
their glass is run out, and ours is running; and therefore it concerns
us to daily die unto sin, and be alive to holiness, standing on the
watchtower, like the sentinel, with "loins girt," and "lamps burning,"
knowing that it is not the stroke, but the sting of death from which the
imputed righteousness of the Redeemer delivers.

God's saints are like a green olive-tree, in the house of God, because
they trust in His manifold mercy. They are like trees planted by the
rivers of water, and whose leaf shall never fade. While death can lay
his cold and icy hand upon the Christian's body, yet his soul he can
never touch. While God destroys the wicked at death, and plucks him out
of his dwelling-place, and roots him out of the land of the living, yet
to die in the Lord is to sing with the Psalmist, "I will not be
afraid," "I will render praises unto thee, for thou hast delivered my
soul from death," "and thou shalt bring me up again from the depths of
the earth."

Heaven is propitious. Streaming love flows from the fountain of Divine
compassion. "God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son,
that whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have everlasting
life." Oh, this constant untiring love of our kind heavenly father.
"Scarcely," says Paul, "for a righteous man will one die: yet,
peradventure, for a good man some would even dare to die; but God
commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ
died for us." If we would _die in the Lord_, we must get a sight of
Calvary. He has died that we might live. We must behold His pierced
hands and feet and side. It is this sight that saves.

Not all the blood of goats and bulls,
On Jewish altars slain,
Can give the guilty conscience peace,
Or wash away the stain.
But Christ, the heavenly Lamb,
Takes _all_ our guilt away.

It is the free gift of grace that, through saving faith, that will hold
us until this short life is past, and then when we come to the river of
death, like our dear Elder, we will reach our home safely. "Where sin
abounded, grace did much more abound, that as sin hath reigned unto
death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto _eternal
life_ by Jesus Christ our Lord."

Are we all who are here to-day to this funeral _in the Lord_--"I in them
and thou in me?" Perhaps, some have been living at