These thoughts and the lessons they teach appear to my mind not inappropriate to the season through which we are passing. Nature is putting on her autumn garb of sombre tints, telling us that her strength and beauty are passing away, and that her days of brightness are declining. The woods, once vocal with the song of birds, now begin to look lonely and deserted. Their stillness is broken only by the rustling fall of the dry and withered leaves, like the stealthy and hushed footsteps heard in the sick chamber. The sighing of the winds through the branches robbed of their crown of verdure is mournful in the ears of the listener, as the low, dreamy moanings in a sick man's sleep. They both speak of decay and whisper of death. Of those of us, my brethren, for whom God is preparing the couch of sickness, against whose sight the light of day will be shut out, and upon whose prostrate form the shadows of suffering will soon fall, some will rise and walk forth in the warm sunshine of a hopeful spring, and some, like the fallen leaves, will never flourish again, but lie, like them, to crumble, decay, and mingle with the dust. {305} Their white pall of the winter snow shall also be ours. The fierce winter storm shall howl its doleful requiem over our heads as it passes by, but we shall not heed it. The earth shall smile in beauty again, but not for us. Oh! be it for us as it may--God knoweth! it will be well for us to have thought upon sickness, and to have prepared our souls for the trial. If health be again granted to us, we shall return to it again all the better for having known how to receive it and how to improve its time. If not, then, when our name shall have become a memory, and our form a vision of the never-returning past, we shall look back from the further shore of the dark river of death over which we have passed, and be glad that we learned how to lean upon God in those last dreadful hours in life, glad that we offered to Him beforehand the willing sacrifice of health and strength and life, and thus ascended from the altar of the bed of suffering, as a victim of acceptable merit in the sight of Him who rewards, more than tongue can tell, the least we ever do or suffer for His sake. ---------------------- {306} Sermon XXI. Thoughts For Advent. (For The Third Sunday Of Advent.) Philippians iv. 8. "__For the rest, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are modest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are holy, whatsoever things are amiable, whatsoever things are of good repute; if there be any virtue, if there be any praise of discipline, think on these things__."