If the call hence comes in somewhat of maturer years, though still in the days of youth, the young man will have lived long enough to have learned the rudiments of saving knowledge, and to have practised the first lessons of Christian faith and Christian duty; and thus the best end for which the loan of life was given, will have found that happy earnest of its future fulness. If, again, the thread of life shall have been continued to later periods of its course, no doubt the opportunities for all those advantages to which life can minister, will render it at all times a blessing and a boon. Nor will you wonder, in comparing the longer with the shorter term of life, that the suit of supplicating parents in our Lord’s days, whether for the child or for the youth, was so often granted by a restoration to a more protracted term of life. You will not wonder that our Blessed Lord should so mark the value of the life which now is, and its connexion, by a right improvement of it, with the life of glory. We are bound, indeed, to bless God for all the dispensations of his hand, for they all serve for good; but we must not reverse the language, not of natural feeling only, but of more just conceptions of the purposes for which life is given, or be led to think that death is the boon, and that a return to this life could be no blessing. When did our Lord make that answer to the mourner’s suit? or when did He reprove the tears and sorrows of survivors with that cold reply? So little ground is there, among the singularities of dress and manners in which some have placed so much of their religion, for refusing to put on the mourning weed for the departed. There is but a single instance in the Sacred Volume of a prohibition so enjoined; and then it was designedly portentous, denoting the last extremity to which offences had grown up in Israel, and the punishments which were to follow.