he windows were open, and above the din of tongues and laughter,
came the thud of a hammer. In the courtyard of the palace the
executioner was setting up the scaffold. And after the banquet came a
grand ball, and the rooms were lighted up, and the ball-room was hung
with festoons of flowers, and the bride and bridegroom led the dance,
but ever as they danced they turned their heads and looked out of the
window, and saw the scaffold, which was being draped in black. At
length, in the midst of all the merriment, the bell began to toll, and
the door flew open, and before all the dancers stood the executioner
with his axe in hand and a black mask over his face, and he beckoned to
the bridegroom to come. "And behold a living man was carried out--to
die."

My Brethren, it is not so very different with us. We carry about the
sentence of death in ourselves. Whatever we do, wherever we go, the
sentence of death is in us. You do your work. You are ploughing the
field and whistling, and you carry, as you make the furrow, the
sentence of death in yourself. You are busy about your house-work,
good-wife, sweeping, dusting, mending, scouring, cooking,--and all the
while you have the sentence of death in yourself. You have a holiday,
and go on a pic-nic, and laugh, and are merry, and come back under the
evening sky singing and making jokes--but you carry with you to your
pic-nic and back again the sentence of death in yourselves.

III. Now if this be so, how ought we to live? Ought we to thrust the
thought away from us as horrible? Ought it to mar our happiness?
Ought it to disquiet us in our work? Far from it. Nain is a pleasant
and beautiful place, but there is one more pleasant and more beautiful,
where the leaves do not fall, nor the flowers wither, where no sickness
comes, and where no dead men are carried out. Let us look to that, the
new Jerusalem, the Heavenly City, the vision of peace, and that will
banish our sadness, we shall not be downcast at leaving so much that is
pleasant behind, but rejoice that we pass on from things temporal to
things eternal.

No! we shall not be saddened by the contemplation of death, but we
shall be made more earnest to use this world without abusing it, to
make the most of our opportunities, to redeem the time because the days
are evil, to run our race temperately, and not uncertainly, and so to
run that we may obtain the incorruptible crown, that we may attain to
the goal, the