st that a God there is, not
always in terror and trembling, but as often perhaps in the assurance of
forgiveness, which, undeserved by the best of the good, may not be
withheld even from the worst of the bad, if the thought of a God and a
Saviour pass but for a moment through the darkness of the departing
spirit--like a dove shooting swiftly, with its fair plumage, through the
deep but calm darkness that follows the subsided storm.

So, too, with respect to Deists. Of unbelievers in Christianity there
are many kinds--the reckless, the ignorant, the callous, the confirmed,
the melancholy, the doubting, the despairing--the _good_. At their
deathbeds, too, may the Christian poet, in imagination, take his
stand--and there may he even hear

"The still sad music of humanity,
Not harsh nor grating, but of amplest power
To soften and subdue!"

Oftener all the sounds and sights there will be full of most rueful
anguish; and that anguish will groan in the poet's lays when his human
heart, relieved from its load of painful sympathies, shall long
afterwards be inspired with the pity of poetry, and sing in elegies,
sublime in their pathos, the sore sufferings and the dim distress that
clouded and tore the dying spirit, longing, but all unable--profound
though its longings be--as life's daylight is about to close upon that
awful gloaming, and the night of death to descend in oblivion--to
believe in the Redeemer.

Why then turn but to such deathbed, if indeed religion, and not
superstition, described that scene--as that of Voltaire? Or even of
Rousseau, whose dying eyes sought, in the last passion, the sight of the
green earth, and the blue skies, and the sun shining so brightly, when
all within the brain of his worshipper was fast growing dimmer and more
dim--when all the unsatisfied spirit, that scarcely hoped a future life,
knew not how it could ever take farewell of the present with tenderness
enough, and enough of yearning and craving after its disappearing
beauty, and when as if the whole earth were at that moment beloved even
as his small peculiar birthplace--

"Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos."

The Christian poet, in his humane wisdom, will, for instruction's sake
of his fellow-men, and for the discovery and the revealment of
ever-sacred truth, keep aloof from such death-beds as these, or take his
awful stand beside them to drop the perplexed and pensive tear. For we
know not what it is that we ei