Is not such a dispensation, for instance, calculated to impress an awful sense of the malignity of sin? So abominable is it, that the blessed God, who has made an ample provision for the future, felicity of his saints, and who is daily imparting to them on earth the invaluable blessings of his grace, cannot, it seems, consistently with his perfection, exempt them from the stroke of death. It is requisite that his detestation of it should be evinced in a complete and undistinguishing overthrow of the race of mortals, amongst whom even those whose names are written in the book of life, on account of their nature being contaminated with depravity must suffer the punishment of temporal death, and show to admiring immortals, that God is "of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and cannot look upon sin." Besides, this demolition of the corporeal frame is an essential means of its purification. The leprosy has infected every part of the building, the members of the body have become instrumental to the working of unrighteousness; and, consequently, "the earthly house of this tabernacle must be _dissolved_." The infliction of this calamity upon believers in Christ as well as upon others, is calculated also to maintain their faith in vigorous and perpetual exercise. Were it permitted to them to pass into another world, as Enoch or Elijah did, by a sudden transportation beyond the regions of mortality to those of undecaying existence, without undergoing "the pains, the groans, the dying strife," or without experiencing the frightful alteration that occurs in other human beings, there would no longer exist the same opportunity as at present for the display of one of the noblest principles of a renewed mind. Who can contemplate the debased condition of the body, who can realize the amazing change which "flesh and blood is heir to"--the icy coldness, the stony insensibility, the universal inanimation that pervades the whole frame, the putrefaction to which it is subject, and the general loathsomeness of that which once appeared the fairest structure amongst the works of God, without an instinctive shuddering, and without perceiving that faith alone can give the victory over death? There is nothing surely in the state of the body _after_ this event to indicate a future existence, but rather every thing to perplex such a sentiment, and to confound such an expectation. There is nothing in its aspect which seems to foretel life--nothing to predict resuscitation. In general, however desperate the case, hope is sustained by the most trifling circumstances, the feeblest glimmerings of the yet unextinguished lamp; if there be the gentlest breath, or the slightest motion, the solicitude of wakeful tenderness is still maintained, and the _possibility_ at least of a return to health is admitted as a welcome and not irrational idea; but when the breath entirely fails, when motion is paralyzed, when the lamp is extinct, whence can any thought of a revival