If even our less sensitive hearts may be wrung with emotion at the tidings of some mournful catastrophe that occupies, after all, but some passing hour in the world's history, but which has carried death and lamentation into many households--the sudden pestilence that has swept down its thousands--the gallant vessel that was a moment before spreading proudly its white wings to the gale, the joyous hearts on board dreaming of hearth and home, and the "many ports that would exult in the gleam of her mast"--the next! hurrying down to the depths of an ocean grave, with no survivor to tell the tale!--or the terrible records of War--the ranks of bold and brave laid low in the carnage of battle--youth and strength and beauty and rank and friendship blent in one red burial!--if these and such like mournful tales of death, and the power of death, affect at the moment even the most callous amongst us, causing the lip to grow pale, and demanding the tribute of more than a tear, oh! what must it have been to the omniscient eye and exquisitely sensitive spirit of Jesus, as, taking in all time at a glance, He beheld the Pale Horse with its ghastly rider trampling under foot the vast human family; converting the globe in which they dwelt into a mournful valley of vision, filled with the wrecks and skeletons of breathing men and animated frames! The triumphs of death are, in ordinary circumstances, to us scarcely perceptible. He moves with noiseless tread. The footprint is made on the sands of time; but like the tides of the ocean, the world's oblivion-power washes it away. The name of yonder churchyard is "the _land of forgetfulness_!" Not so with the Lord of Life, the great Antagonist of this usurper! The future, a ghastly future, rose in appalling vividness before Him.--Death (vulture-like) flapping his wings over the multitudes he claimed as his own,--vessels freighted with immortality lying wrecked and stranded on the shores of Time!