BY THE LATE BISHOP KYLE.
Reader—There is a text in the Bible which says, “It is appointed unto men once to die.” (Heb. 9:2727And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment: (Hebrews 9:27).) Happy would it be for men if all would think of this, and not put away the subject of death from their minds. One reason why so many are not ready to die when their turn comes, is their unwillingness to think about death while they are well.
Reader, settle it down in your mind that death is the end to which you must come at last, unless the Lord shall first return to judgment. After all our scheming, and contriving, and planning, and studying—after all our inventions and discoveries, and scientific attainments—there remains one enemy we cannot conquer and disarm, and that is death. The chapter in Genesis which records the long lives of Methuselah and the rest which lived before the flood, winds up the simple story of each by two expressive words: “he died.” And now, after 4,800 years, what more can be said of the greatest among ourselves? The histories of Marlborough, and Washington, and Napoleon, and Wellington, arrived at just the same humbling conclusion. The end of each, after all his greatness, is just this: “he died.”
Death is a mighty leveler. He spares none, he waits for none, and stands on no ceremony. He will not tarry till you are ready. He will not be kept out by moats, and doors, and bars, and bolts. The Englishman boasts that his house is his castle, but with all his boasting he cannot exclude death. An Austrian nobleman forbade death and the smallpox to be named in his presence. But named or not named, it matters little: in God’s appointed hour death will come.
One man rolls easily along the road in the best-appointed carriage. Another toils wearily along the path on foot. Yet both are sure to meet at last in the same home.
One man, like Absalom, has fifty servants to wait upon him, and do his bidding. Another has none to lift a finger to do him a service. But both are traveling to a place where they must lie down alone.
One man is the owner of hundreds of thousands. Another has scarce a shilling that he can call his own property. Yet neither one nor the other can carry one farthing with him into the unseen world.
One man is the possessor of half a county. Another has not so much as a garden of herbs. And yet two paces of the vilest earth will be amply sufficient for either of them at the last.
You wonder sometimes at the tone and language of ministers of the Gospel. You marvel that we press upon you to make sure that you are born again, and ready for heaven. You go away and say to one another, “The man means well, but he goes too far.”
But do you not see that the reality of death is continually forbidding us to use other language?
Reader, remember what you have just been reading. Depend upon it no dying man ever yet complained that he had thought too much about death while he was in health.