to learn how to die; and since we every moment die prepared for death; but they learned to die daily, by making of life a continual apprenticeship to death. This is what I have to explain to you as the third head of discourse.

III. To make of life an apprenticeship to death, and by this apprenticeship in reality to learn how to die, and to form ourselves for that period, is not this not only a paradox, but even a contradiction?-For every apprenticeship supposes two things, namely a frequent practice of the same kind of employment, and a power to begin a piece of work anew, and rectify mistakes made in a former attempt. Now neither the one nor the other of these circumstances is found in death; because we die but once, and after death there is no return to rectify mistakes. Still, my hearers, it is a maxim of all the fathers of the Church that we may learn how to die; and that this is the most important of all kinds of knowledge, next to the knowledge of God; if indeed this can be distinguished from the knowledge of God. There is, say they, an apprenticeship to death; and in this apprenticeship the saints of old were formed. All their care during life, was to study death; and as it is natural for us to do that well with which we are acquainted, and which we have long practised, they died a holy death. because they well understood the knowledge of death.

Now it depends but upon ourselves to imitate them. There are three truths which regard us as well as them, and which we all ought to apply to ourselves. First, We in a sense die every day, according to the word of the Holy Spirit; it is then easy for us to learn how to die: Secondly, All the creatures which surround us exhibit a lesson upon mortality; our ignothen without excuse if we do not know how Thirdly, That holy life to which God calls us, is, so to speak, a continual practice of death; we are then very culpable in not being more versed and

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more experienced in the art of death. Let us attend to an illustration of these truths.

1. There is a sense, my hearers, in which it is not true that we die but once. We die every hour; and every hour we may die voluntarily and freely, not only without sin, but it is our duty so to do. God having threatened Adam that he should immediately die if he disobeyed, the sentence, according to the remark of St. Ireneus, was executed upon him the moment that he violated the divine command. Otherwise, adds the same Saint, God would not have been sin. cere in the judgment which he had pronounced, nor have carried his threatening into effect. For he did not say to Adam, Thou shalt die at some future day : Thou shalt die at a certain time: Thou shalt die after having lived so many years and so many ages; but he said to him absolutely, Thou shalt die the very day and instant that thou shalt sin; and the sentence was executed this way. From that time Adam, in punishment for his disobedience, became subject to all sorts of infirmities; from that time he felt his constitution weakened; and his body, degraded, if I may so speak, from the privilege of innocence, began to decay and consequently to die. Now, what was verified in him is equally verified in us; and even Pagans have acknowledged this. We deceive ourselves, said Seneca, one of their wise men ; and it is an error in us always to consider death as future. Instead of this being the case, a great part of death is already past with us; and we should consider that death holds under its domain the whole of our lives up to the present time. But St. Paul has said the same still more expressly, and the word of that Apostle is of the greatest authority. "I protest by your rejoicing, which I have in Christ Jesus our Lord, I die daily."*

Now, if we die every day, can we say it is difficult 1 Corinthians xv. 31,

necessarily, what hinders us from accustoming ourselves to die voluntarily, and from choice? Our eyes are as it were enchanted with the view of present objects; but if there is a charm upon our eyes, we : ought to seek a remedy for it in our minds; and the remedy is fully to believe according to the remark of St. Austin, that this body which appears to us living, is in fact a decaying and dying body. These words are full of force and energy. You live; but the same principle which makes you live is that which makes you die; and although your senses may tell you the contrary, it is for your reason to correct them, by teaching you, that that period which seems to you to be life is but the beginning and the progress of death.

2. But again, who shall teach us how to die? And to what school shall we go to learn this important lesson? Who shall teach us, my hearers? All the creatures of the universe, and especially those by which we ourselves subsist and live. Indeed we need not go out of ourselves; it is within us that we may find all the proofs of certain death. We have only to interrogate ourselves; every thing within us will tell us, with a secret but united voice, that we must die; and whatever we may oppose to this in our own favor, we shall never have any answer but this, we ⚫ must die. Thou art rich and in opulence; but thou must die. Thou hast credit and reputation; but thou must die. Thou art young and in a situation to taste the delights of life; but thou must die. Thou "art the idol of the world; but thou must die. This is the only language which we shall ever hear; because God, in our creation, deeply engraved on our being this general answer, made to us by all the elements which compose our system, and which, by destroying each other, destroy us with them.

But if we look out of ourselves we shall find that all the creatures which surround us, and which serve for our sustenance and comfort, not only announce

death to us, but actually form and exercise as for death. By quitting us, by separating themselves from us, by ceasing to be with us, they teach us practically, to die. To how many things may we not say that we are already dead, and that we die incessantly? The pleasures of youth are no longer suited to us nor we to them; the joy of yesterday to-day is not, and we are dead to it; the honors which were formerly conferred upon us are now no more, and ob livion, which is itself a kind of death, has annihilated them from the memory of man; and as those honors and those pleasures have already quitted us, every thing else, I do not say will quit us, but quits us as we enjoy it. Now is not that a very gross blindness of ours which prevents us after so much experience, and so many proofs of death, from learning how to die?

3. But the great and essential obligation lying up on us to cultivate a practical knowledge of death is the profession of Christianity to which God has called us; since, according to the rules of scripture, a Christian life, properly speaking, is nothing but a continual death. For this reason St. Paul, who perfectly well apprehended this truth, gave to the primitive Christians no other idea of what they were but this. "Ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." And agian, "We are buried with him by baptism into death;" which passages are to be understood, says St. Chrysostom, not in a figurative but in the strictly literal sense of the words. For to what do all the maxims of Christianity tend but to detach the soul from the body, that is to say, to detach it from the sensual pleasures, from the servi tude and slavery of the body? Now, to detach the soul from the body, what is this but to teach it to die? And this our religion imposes on us as a law, by enjoining upon us to mortify the body, and thus to die continually.

Let us then, my dear hearers, follow the leadings of the Spirit. Let us detach ourselves from that body which the scriptures so often call a body of sin; and let us not wait for death to spoil us of it by force, since it is in our power, and even our duty, to do this of ourselves. A soul which renounces the body at the instant of death only is a soul unworthy of God. You ask for a practical direction to teach you to die well. I will mention one, without which I dare to assert that all others are vain and chimerical. Detach your souls from every thing which you love, separate from God. This in a few words, is the science of dying. Prevent, by a voluntary mortification, the violent and grievous operations of death. Death will take from you the use of your senses; cause them to die in advance, by retrenching from them every thing which can displease God. Death will take from you your wealth; quit it now in mind and heart. Instead of indulging an insatiable thirst of amassing and accumulating treasures upon treasures, think it, in imitation of God, an honor to distribute them. Instead of desiring what you have not, give away, without regret and even with joy, what you possess.-Death will separate you from your friends; withdraw, therefore, your attachment from them in season, in a Christian like manner, and renounce all improper and dangerous connections. Reserve nothing; and remember that fine thought of the Abbe Rupert, that mortification, in order to do the office of death, and to have its qualities, ought to be absolute and universal. As people do not say that a man is dead, for his having lost his speech and his sight only, but in order for that he must be deprived of all action and of all feeling; so we cannot say that a Cristian is mortified, for having repressed some of his sensual appetites, if he has not repressed them all, and brought them all under subjection to God. When disgraces, afflictions, calamities, losses, happen to you, say to God, rising