t loss will be worse than
the first.

Sometimes we feel as though we were sailing away from our departed
friends, leaving them behind us. Not so; we are sailing towards them;
they went forward, and we are nearer to them now than yesterday; and the
night is far spent; the day is at hand. If life, or any undue portion,
be spent in grief which unfits us for duty, we shall see, in heaven, how
much better it would have been had we had more faith, and had lived more
as then we should desire our surviving friends to live, quickened and
strengthened by the assured hope of our being in heaven, and by the
expectation of meeting us there.

But there is one kind of sorrow and desire for departed friends which,
in its consequences, is greatly to be deplored. Some refuse to become
decided Christians, because their friends, they think, were not
believers in the faith which these surviving friends are now persuaded
is the truth. To embrace this truth, as essential to salvation, it is
felt, will be to condemn these departed friends; and some have, in so
many words, declared that they preferred to share the fate of their
companions, or children, who gave no evidence of having accepted the
gospel, as it is now viewed by these survivors.

How sad would be such a catastrophe as this: The departed friend, in the
secret exercises of his mind, and by the good Spirit of God, may have
been, at the last hour, prevailed upon to accept the offers of salvation
by a crucified Redeemer. He gave no intimation of this, owing, perhaps,
to bodily weakness, or to fear and distrust; but, through infinite
mercy, he was saved by faith in the Lamb of God. The surviving friend,
persuaded of the truth, refuses to comply with it, and loves the
departed friend more than Christ, or truth and duty; and then, dying,
finds that the departed friend is saved, through that very faith, which
the other refused from idolatrous attachment to the departed; and now
they are separated; whereas, had the survivor forsaken all for Christ
and the truth, he would have had a hundred fold in this world, and, in
the world to come, would have found that friend whom he would, as it
were, have forsaken for Christ's sake and the gospel's. It is safe, it
is best, for each of us to do his duty, to walk by the light afforded
us, and not to make a creature our standard, nor our chief good.

If we meet certain of our friends at the end of their search after
pleasure, having forgotten their