_Dear Friend_,--I take this method to write to you, with a desire you would receive it as a friendly admonition. You recollect, no doubt, that I have heard you make two speeches at funerals, as they are commonly called, one at the grave and the other at the house of sorrow and mourning, upon a very solemn and singular occasion. At the grave you were short, and said, if I mistake not, viewing the grave, "this is the house appointed for all living," two or three times, and then said, "what reflection shall we make from it? is it done by an enemy? has the Almighty suffered the government to be taken out of his hands?"--and spake as if death was originally designed by the Almighty for the good of mankind, and made it a very desirable thing. My dear sir, doth not the bible, which is the word of God, or the scriptures of truth say, "Wherefore as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin, and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned," Rom. v. 12, and Rom. vi. 23, "For the wages of sin is death." God who is a gracious and holy sovereign "made man upright, but he sought out many inventions." By listening unto that apostate spirit, Satan, he transgressed and disobeyed his maker and sovereign, by eating the forbidden fruit. "God made man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them. And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it and to keep it; and the Lord God commanded the man, saying, of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat, but of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it, for in the day thou eatest thereof, thou shall surely die." Gen. ii. 15, 17. Sin is that enemy that introduced or was the cause of death, as we may further see by considering that portion of scripture, I John. iii. 8, "He that committeth sin is of the devil, for the devil sinneth from the beginning." For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil. Sin is the work of the devil; "the soul that sins shall die." If you will read the whole chapter and seriously consider it, and pray to God through Jesus Christ to open your understanding, that you may understand the scriptures, you would not misappply and pervert them as I fear you do. In your speaking at the house of mourning, you began and spake very eloquently at first upon death; then you brought forward the same ideas, with respect to death, as you did before at the grave. I do not remember that you, at either place, spake one word of the necessity or nature of repentance. Christ began his personal and public ministry by preaching repentance, saying, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand"--again, "but except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish," Luke xiii. 5. And after his resurrection from the dead he appeared to his disciples and confirmed them in the certainty of it, and chose them witnesses of the