Sin makes man meet death; and death brings him to a meeting with God. Those, who would not meet him, in his ordinances, by _prayer_ or through _faith_, in a Mediator, shall be _forced_ to an interview with the holy and eternal Jehovah at his tribunal, to _give an account for all the deeds done in the body_. To those, who _have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb_, Rev. vii. 14, this meeting will be the commencement of perfect, perpetual, and uninterrupted bliss: but to the unrighteous it will be, beyond description, horrible. To _these_, death comes as an executioner; lays his axe to the root of the trees; and gives the fatal blow. If rotten and fruitless, down they fall, and so they lie as fuel fit for _everlasting burnings_. Isa. xxxiii. 14. Then the wicked launch into eternity; are consigned over to the bar of God; and receive their eternal doom. The instant life’s silken cord is broken, and the soul dislodged from the body, the sinner is either transported on the wings of cherubs to Abraham’s bosom, or lifts up his eyes with _that rich man_, in endless torments: if he meet God in his sins, unpardoned and unconverted; God meets him as a _consuming fire_, Heb. xii. 29, clad in all his vengeance and terrors. O sirs, it is this consideration, that strips death of all that unimportance, with which, from the frequency of its arrival, it is viewed, in general, by a thoughtless world. _To die_, sounds common, and appears trivial; but not so, _to die and be damned_, _or to die and be saved_. When we consider, that either eternal damnation, or eternal salvation, is the instant and inseparable consequence of death; how wicked, how diabolically absurd, are the jests of the infidel and the wit, when affecting to smile at that solemn event! However, with all the affected gaiety of the proud and the profane, when they come to lie on a death-bed, their mirth will forsake them, and all the boasted heroism of infidelity sink in a dreadful succession of horror and dismay. And no wonder; since “’Tis not _the dying_, but ’tis _this_ they fear, To be—they know not _what_, they know not _where_!”