1. _It is appointed unto all men once to die_, agreeably to the original sentence delivered to our first parents, _Dust thou art_, _and unto dust shall thou return_. _For_, _as by one man sin entered into the world_, _and death by sin_; _so death passed upon all men_, _for that all have sinned_. Rom. v. 12. _The wages of sin is death_. Rom. vi. 23. That we might be impressed with a due sense of the _cause_ of that awful change which passeth upon man at his dissolution; the scriptures uniformly ascribe it to the first man’s disobedience, in which was involved the sin of his posterity, and death, as one portion of the entailed penalty. The scriptural account of the origin of death, as very precisely and satisfactorily traced in the 5th chapter of the epistle to the Romans, is, that Adam sinned; that _in him_, as a public person, ἐφ’ ᾦ, _all_ sinned; and that, because all _sinned in_ him as their representative, therefore all die through him, or are obnoxious to death, the very moment they are born, and are _by nature the children of wrath_. Ephes. ii. 3. After the scriptures of truth have instructed us in the origin of sin, they then proceed to a description of that calamity of universal influence—death, with which are connected innumerable woes. This is done, with a view to impress man with a solemn truth, which every trifle tends to obliterate from his mind, viz. _that he must die_; to humble him under a sense of that guilt, from whence his mortality originated, and to solemnize and prepare him for an event as inevitable, as uncertain, in the time of its arrival. Hence death is represented as a king of mighty power, extensive dominion, and universal sway; before whose unconquerable arm, even conquering kings themselves fall; and to whom, as to a superior potentate, they must resign those very trophies that marked their own conquests, together with all the glittering regalia of sceptres, diadems, and thrones, which lie as spoils at death’s footstool.—As a king of _terrors_; whose train is composed of the terrific attendants of the pestilence, the famine, the sword, the earthquake; and all the numerous maladies which attack the body, or torture the mind; by which, as by a great army, death invades this _microcosm_ man, and converts the globe into an _aceldama_ or field of blood, filled with promiscuous heaps of slain. As a monster, armed with a _sting_, 1 Cor. xv. 56, so _pointed_ as to strike through the liver of the stoutest transgressor; so impoisoned, as to communicate a venom, which mocks all the powers of medicine; and so _deadly_, as, by its baneful influence, to blast health in its highest vigor, and youth in perfect prime; and to reduce the outward fabric of man to a state, humble as the dust, and vile as the crawling reptile.