MISCELLANEOUS THOUGHTS. 45 A 'paper with the most pathetic lines written upon it, has no fear nor hope, no zeal or compassion ; it is conscious of tra design, nor has any solicitude for the success; and a mere reader, who coldly tells the people what his paper says, seems to be as void of all these necessary qualifications, as his paper is XXVII. The Church yard. WHEN I enter into a church -yard, I love to converse with the dead. See how thick the hillocks of mortality arise all around me, each of them a monument of death, and the cover- ing of a son or daughter of Adam. Perhaps a thousand or ten thousand pieces of human nature, heaps upon heaps, lie buried in this spot of ground; it is the old repository of the inhabitants of the neighbouring town; a collection of the ruins of many ages, and the rubbish of twenty generations. ' I say within myself, What a multitude of human beings, noble creatures, are here reduced to dust! God has broken his own best workmanship to pieces, and demolished by thousands the finest earthly structures of his own building. Death has entered in, and reigned over this town for many successive cen- turies: it had its commission from God, and it has devoured multitudes of men. Should a stranger make the enquiry which is expressed; Dent. xxix. 25. " Wherefore has the Lord done thus to the t work of his own hands ? What meaneth the heat of this great N anger ?" The answer is ready, verse 25, &c. " Because they f have sinned, they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God, x therefore the Lord has rooted them out of their land in anger, and in wrath, and in great indignation, and bath cast them into another land, even the land of corruption and darkness, as it is at this day." But have not other towns, cities and villages their church- yards too ? My thoughts take the hint, and fly abroad through all the burying- places of the nations. What millions of mankind lie under the ground in urns, or mingled with common clay ? Every ancient town and city in the world has burnt or buried all its inhabitants more than thirty times over : What wide spread- ing slaughter, what lamentable desolation, has death made among the children of men ! But the vengeance is just in all each of them are sinners; " and the anger of God bath kindled . against them to bring upon them the first curse that is 'written in his book, " In the day that thou sinnest thou shalt surely die;" Gen. ii. 17. Go to the church -yard then, O sinful and thoughtless mor- tal; go learn from every tombstone and every rising hillock, that the wages of sin is death. Learn in silence among the dead that lesson which infinitely concerns all the living; nor let thy heart
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