Trees and flowers grow to their full stature, fill up their measure of time, and pass away. Beasts and birds are more rarely cut off with disease. Their lives are not embittered with the expectation of death; the knowledge of the past and the present is all they have; they have no knowledge of the morrow; they live contented in their ignorance and indifference, and, at last, sink into the deep, unending night, "being made to be taken and destroyed." But this is not the history of man. He perishes from the cradle to the tomb--"suffers a hundred deaths in fearing one." He is conscious of the dangers that beset him. He is hedged in on every side. Death is constantly destroying his fondest hopes and causing him the sorest grief. It bursts the ties that bind heart to heart, and the dearest fellowships are severed, and the joys of a blessed life are wrapped in the gloom of death. All there was of earthly bliss in the bygone now makes up his anguish. Is it possible that life and death walk "arm-in-arm?" Yes; even while we are happy in the enjoyment of one, the other comes and casts the fearful mantle over all our earthly prospects. Seal up this blessed volume of life, and I know not from whence the light is to spring which would cheer this gloomy picture. Without this, man would be in a grade of blessedness beneath the brutes that perish. It would be better to be anything than rational without the religion of Jesus Christ and the intelligence of the Bible. The Scriptures inform us that these things have a cause, that they come from God's dealings with his creatures, that the unseen hand which permits these trials is benevolent and wise. Sorrow has its design, and it is neither unkind nor malignant. These things have a moral cause; they are the great rebuke of God for sin. They are also a part of the discipline of a Heavenly Father, designed to co-operate with the Gospel in bringing back all those who are intelligently exercised thereby to their forsaken God. The antidote for all these ills culminating in death was the tree of life. When man sinned against his God he was put away from the tree of life. If he had remained with it he would have been beyond the reach of the motive of life, and beyond the restraining power of the fear of death. He would have lived forever, subject, like fallen angels, to mental suffering during the ages to come. But being placed beyond the reach of the tree of life he may be redeemed by the love of life to a higher state. When the rebellious see and realize this great truth, being exercised by the chastening hand of God, they are often subdued to submission, to peace, and under the heaviest calamities they often look upward and say, "It is the Lord, let his will be done." And this, of itself, is a source of unbounded bliss.