ever; according to thine unmerited kindness and benignity to us, which thou hast revealed by our Lord Jesus Christ. Now unto thee, O Father, &c. June 22, 1788. SERMON SERMON XXIII. 1 THESSALONIANS iv. 13. But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them that are asleep. It has been a frequent complaint, that, whilst mankind have died and disappeared in succession one after another for so many ages, no traveller ever returned from the dusky regions of the dead to tell what passed, or how it fared with them. But these persons did not consider, that if any one had returned and been brought to live again here, he could have given us no information of any thing. For, alas! all is utter silence, darkness, and insensibility, in those mansions to which death consigns us. Philosophers have, indeed, in their speculations, distinguished man into two separate parts, soul or spirit, and body, and have maintained that the thinking part is separable from 1 from the other, and independent of it, so that it continues to live when the body dies. But experience vouches for nothing of the kind. The whole man appears to die and become extinguished all at once. All the stories of ghosts and apparitions, in all ages, are the mere fictions of wild and disordered imaginations, or of religious craft. And though the sacred writers use the popular language of soul and body as the two component parts of man, they give no countenance to their separation at death, and the soul living without the body. There would be no meaning to be conveyed by words, if, when it is said, for instance, (Gen. v. 5.) that Adam died, we are to understand that he continued to live, and live in his better and nobler part; or, when men are described as buried and asleep with their fathers, we are to believe that they and their fathers were, nevertheless, at the same time alive without their bodies. The scriptures declare the contrary, even of good men, in numberless instances. To name only one or two; (Is. xxxviii. 18.) "The grave cannot praise thee: death cannot celebrate thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy thy truth." (Ps. vi. 5.) "In death there is no remembrance of thee." (cxv. 17.) "The dead praise not thee, O Lord, neither those that go down into silence." (Eccl. ix. 5.) "The dead know not any thing." Our blessed Saviour in his mild way, and in agreement with the language of the prophets before him, speaks of death as a sleep, out of which mankind were to be awaked at the resurrection; when they that were in their graves should hear his voice and come forth. It is the same language which his apostle here and elsewhere uses, styling the dead, persons asleep. But in sleep there is no sense of any thing. We can, then, as no traveller has ever returned, only know by dint of information from the gracious Power that made us, and from those extraordinarily taught and commissioned by him, the ancient prophets, and Christ, and his apostles, what is our condition at death, and what is the state we are to enter upon immediately after the sleep of death is over. And our apostle, in the passage beginning with the words prefixed to my discourse, reveals the knowledge of many things concerning man's future existence, which Nature's light could not teach. this: The occasion was These christians of Thessalonica, in Greece, where some few of their descendants still remain, had been brought by him to the knowledge of the one true God, and of the way to his favour for ever, as discovered by Jesus Christ; and on this account were greatly attached to him, and no less beloved by him in return for their ready acceptance of the truth. And being exceedingly anxious for their perseverance in it, especially on account of the persecutions to which they were exposed, and which had driven him away from them, he sends his favourite Timothy with this letter to inquire after and to be helpful to them. The heathens were wont to make prodigious howlings and lamentations at the death of their friends and relations; which well they might, as they had nothing solid to rest upon that all was not then over with them. St. Paul perhaps had heard by some channel or other, that his new christian converts at Thessalonica continued still to give into these unseemly excesses at the funeral of their friends; he therefore judged it needful to correct their error, and to teach them better. "But |