August 22

The living know that they shall die. - Ecclesiastes 9:5.

BUT there are limits to this knowledge: let us consider these. “The living know that they shall die,” but they know not when. If there are persons who have seemed to have some kind of apprehensions or intimations previously of the time of their dissolution, these were casual and not prophetic; events alone rendered them predictions. “There is an appointed time to man upon the earth; his days also are like the days of an hireling;” God has appointed his bounds, which he cannot pass; it is he who has filled our glass, and he knows how many sands there are to run out.

But he communicates not this knowledge to any man; and therefore every man must say, with Isaac, “I know not the day of my death,” nor the week, nor the year. “The living know that they shall die,” but they know not where, -whether at home in the bosom of the family, or among unconcerned strangers,-in the garden, in the field, or on the road. Where have not persons died? Some have died in the house of God; some have died at the card-table; some have died in the playhouse. Ehud died in his summer parlour, and Pharaoh in the Red Sea. There seems hardly to be a place which has not, at one time or other, been a door of entrance into eternity. “The living know that they shall die,” but they know not how, -whether suddenly or slowly, whether by fever or by dropsy, whether by accident or by the hands and device of wicked and unreasonable men. “One dieth,” says Job, “in his full strength, being wholly at ease and quiet; his breasts are full of milk, and his bones are moistened with marrow. Another dieth in the bitterness of his soul, and never eateth with pleasure. They shall lie down alike in the dust, and the worms shall cover them.” “The living know that they shall die,” but not what it is to die.

Thus Joshua said to the Jews, “Ye are going a way that ye have not gone heretofore.” It will be a new path to all of us. Here is a case in which no information can be derived from experience, -none from our own experience, none from the experience of others; for no one, however charged or importuned, ever returned to let

“the fatal secret out,

And tell us what it is to die.”