emain, to turn away the impending retributions of
wickedness and guilt. What is right, within the conditions of
Infinite wisdom and goodness, will be done in spite of all
traditional juggles and spasmodic spiritual attitudinizations.
What can it avail that a most vile and hardened wretch, when
dying, convulsed with fright and possessed with superstition,
compels, or strives to compel, a certain sentiment into his soul,
conjures, or tries to conjure, his mind into the relation of
belief towards a certain ancient and abstract dogma?

"Yet I've seen men who meant not ill, Compelling doctrine out of
death, With hell and heaven acutely poised Upon the turning of a
breath."

Cruelly racking the soul with useless probes of theological
questions and statements, they stand by the dying to catch the
words of his last breath, and, in perfect consistence with their
faith, they pronounce sentence accordingly. If, as the pallid lips
faintly close, they hear the magic words, "I put my trust in the
atoning blood of Christ," up goes the soul to heaven. If they hear
the less stereotyped words, "I have tried to do as well as I
could: I hope God will be merciful towards me and receive me,"
down goes the soul to hell. Strange and cruel superstition, that
imagines God to act towards men only according to the evanescent
temper and technical phrase with which they leave the world! The
most popular English preacher of the present day, the Rev. Mr.
Spurgeon, after referring to the fable that those before whom
Perseus held the head of Medusa were turned into stone in the very
act and posture of the moment when they saw it, says, "Death is
such a power. What I am when death is held before me, that I must
be forever. When my spirit goes, if God finds me hymning his
praise, I shall hymn it in heaven: doth he find me breathing out
oaths, I shall follow up those oaths in hell. As I die, so shall I
live eternally!" 12

No: the true preparation for death and the invisible realm of
souls is not the eager adoption of an opinion, the hurried
assumption of a mood, or the frightened performance of an outward
act: it is the patient culture of the mind with truth, the pious
purification of the heart with disinterested love, the consecrated
training of the life in holiness, the growth of the soul in habits
of righteousness, faith, and charity, the organization of divine
principles into character. Every real preparation of the soul for
death must be a char