BY REV. JOHN TODD, D.D.,

PASTOR OF THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, PITTSFIELD, MASS.

IN MEMORIAM OF REV. JOAB BRACE, D.D.*

"Shall he live again?"-JOB 14: 14.

IN the twilight of the world, before the birth of Moses, and before any part of the Bible was written, as is supposed, there lived a Sage in the East, who had been stripped of all his worldly possessions, who was mocked by his friends, tempted to suicide by his wife, bereaved of all his children, who seemed to be too far crushed ever to rise again, who seemed to be standing on the confines of eternity, looking into the open grave, and anxiously asking if he can live again? Will he lie down there, and be

* Preached at Newington, Conn., April 24th, 1861, at the funeral of Dr. Brace, to the Church and Congregation where he had been the Pastor for fifty-six years.

buried, gone, forgotten, perished forever like a beast, or will he live again? What is that dark doom hanging over men?

He speaks as if he was sitting down on a cliff, and looking off upon a dark, mysterious river that rolls at the foot of the cliff. The clouds cover it, darkness broods over it, and cold mists hang around it. And he sees that men, of all ages, as they come near, slip into that river. The old man stoops over, and seems to be looking for it, but ere he is aware, he stumbles, and is in it. The strong man with a firm tread, the young man lithe and elastic in step, the maiden as she trips along in her freshness, ere they have time to draw back, have fallen in. The father leads his little son by the hand, and the child's hand lets go, and he has sunk. The mother comes with her arms closely embracing her beautiful babe, but it slips from her very arms, and drops into that river! They have no time to shriek ere they are gone. The friends stoop and peer into the thick mists that hang over the river, but can see nothing. There are no murmurs to these silent waters. There is no lifting up to that thick cloud. They send back no messages. They lift no voice. The Sage only sees that they go out of sight. Will they ever live again? Do they cross that river and gain the shore beyond? Oh! the question is not, will my camels, my oxen, my asses, my property ever come back to me-not, whether this leprosy that makes me loathe myself, shall be gone, and I have health return-not, are my children decently buried-not, will these friends now reproaching me, ever alter their opinion of me; but it is: "If a man die, shall be live again?" Is there any resurrection from that river? The tree that is cut down may have a resurrection in its new sprouts; the seed may have a resurrection; the earth may have a resurrection in the spring; the worm may live again in the butterfly; but "if a man die, shall he live again?"

You, who in providence are gathered here, in the house of God at this time-some aged, and who have long lived in the shadow of the tomb-some marked for an early grave, all shortly to sink into that dark, silent stream, will you ever live again? Will these all live again! The aged patriarch and honored minister of Christ, whose dust lies before me, will he ever rise again?

As the traveler passes over the Apennine mountains, and his eye stretches off over the olive-yards, and the sunny plains, searching for the blue waters of the Mediterranean sea in the distance, he can conceive that all that plain was once the bed of the sea; but when he looks down and sees the sea shells, born far down in the deep waters, embedded in the rock at his feet, and on the very summit of the mountain, he wonders what awful convulsion of nature, what mighty power it was, that lifted up the very floor of the sea, and made it the top of the mountain! What demon of the earth once put his back under the Apennines, and

thus heaved them up? When you see the worm creeping up the bush and weaving her shroud, and dying, and yet a mysterious power bringing her through to a resurrection-when you read the history of the poor boy who shot up through poverty and ignorance and obscurity, till he wore a crown, and commanded an empire-when you read the story of a nation rising up from a single man, grooving, and deepening the channel of its historywhen you see the astronomer mapping the heavens, and marking out the paths of comets, and the places of suns, weighing the planets, and balancing the universe-when you gaze at that blank scroll now held by the Angel of Time, and on which the history of your country is yet to be written, then, I say, the traveler on the mountain, and the mind before me, is absorbed on great questions and in profound meditation; but a thousand such questions would not weigh a feather compared with the greater question in my text: "If a man die, shall he live again ?"

I. What makes it seem improbable that he will?

All men feel that death is the result of sin. They do not suppose that death would ever enter Eden, or mar the blessedness of heaven, if sin were kept out. It is sin that came, bringing the flood as a destroyer, and sin hath dug every grave since. The executioner is daily at his work. I go to the graveyard, and it is full of little cells in which the prisoners are shut up. They were stripped of all ere they were confined there. The purple and the fine linen are exchanged for the winding-sheet. Here you love your friends; at the grave you silently turn away from them. Here you are proud of your friends; there you say to corruption: "Thou art my father; and to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister." Here you walk in your pride and adorning; there a shroud is all you want. Here the eye flashes, the tongue is eloquent, the cheek glows, and the hands are skillful. There the eye is quenched, the tongue is silent, the cheek is cold and white, and the hands have lost their cunning. The coffin returns no answer to your sigh; the hand returns no pressure; the friend is dead, and you must bury him out of sight. You do not want him to remain in your house. And all must thus die. Perhaps under your pew is a sleeper; perhaps in your garden your flowers bloom over the dead. The seven hundred and fifty millions who have died within the last thirty years, are but a drop in the bucket compared with the uncounted multitudes who have passed away. No one ever returns, no messenger comes from them, no form revives. The cold winds of winter that whistle over the grave, and the frosts that shut them up, are not the key that keeps the grave closed. Wise men have looked into the grave, and tried to peer into eternity; but they heard no voice, and felt no breath breathing upon the bones, and causing them to

live. They could not tell whether the soul could live without the body, much less, that the body would ever return to life. The volume of eternity was sealed with seven seals, and they could not break the seals. They saw nothing beyond the grave; and the idea that a man who died should live again, was almost too much to hope for! The teacher of Alexander the Great, when he come to die, saw not one ray of hope, and in his agony put up this remarkable prayer: "Defiled I came into this world, anxious I have lived in, terrified I leave it; O thou who art the cause of causes! pity me." These great men of earth, who now loom up in the past, were able to gather most beautiful garlands from the fields of poetry and philosophy, and to search every nook and corner of earth, but could not tell whether, if a man die, he shall live again! The Pharisee lived on tradition, and the more learned Sadducee denied that there was either angel or spirit, and the learned at Athens turned away with unutterable disgust from Paul when he preached "Jesus and the resurrection." Human reason sees the house taken down, and every timber dissolved, and every particle turned into dust. Would the house be demolished and ground into the very dust, if it were ever again to be inhabited? Will God visit a body so lost that we can not find it; so scattered that we can not gather it; so loathsome that we can not endure it? How improbable, then, does it seem, that the lifeless man shall ever come up out of that grave; that he shall again stand up, with an ear that can hear, with an eye that can see, with a tongue that can speak, with hands that can execute, with feet that can walk! No wonder, when Lazarus came out of the tomb, they were so amazed, that they had to be told-even hist sisters to unbind the awful form, and let him. be free! Can the dead live again?

II. The resurrection of the body seems probable, and that for

two reasons:

1. There is an undefined impression on the minds of all men that the dead will live again.

The heathen, who had no light on this subject, were very anxious to bury their dead, so that families might sleep side by side. Every great family had a huge tomb, in which they were gathered from generation to generation. In the twilight of the revelation, Abraham purchased a family burying-place, though wandering among strangers. The language of Jacob is the language of the human heart. "I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their burying-place. And he charged them, and said unto them, I am to be gathered unto my people; bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron, the Hittite, for a possession of a buryingplace there they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they

buried Isaac and Rebecca his wife, and there I buried Leah." The savage has been known to take the corpse of his wife, and carry it on his shoulders, a hundred miles through the forest, in order to lay it among the bones of his family. What is that undefined hope that half-formed belief-that at this family gathering-place, there is yet to be some mighty change, so that they shall live again? What voice is it that whispers to the heart, that perhaps some day, at some distant period, there shall come some unknown power, capable of lifting up the sleepers, and restoring the perished ones to life? We can not explain this hope; we can not account for this expectation, unless it be, that these are straggling rays of light which have shot out from revelation, and which can not The very man who scorns his now be traced to their source. Bible, and scouts at its commands, has belief enough to wish for a place where all his family can be buried. But

2. The changes which we see take place around us, show the Resurrection to be highly probable.

You see a pile of sand dug out of the cold hills. It can be poured, and shoveled. A man takes it and puts it in the furnace, and it comes out, not the heavy, dark substance, called sand, but the beautiful piece of glass ready to be used as a mirror, or as a telescope, with which to measure the heavens. A great change wrought by man! Can not God work changes equally great, and far greater?

You see the little acorn trodden by the ox into the ground; it has lain there till nearly decayed, and yet God will raise, not the acorn, but the oak from that decaying little thing. The power of the resurrection is there!

The autumn leaves us; and as he goes he strips the leaves off the trees; his cold breath chills the grass and the flowers, and they wither and die. Desolation and dreariness cover the face of the earth. The birds utter short and sad notes as they gather Winter thrusts his spear into our rivers together to leave us. and lakes, and they stiffen and freeze. The ground is frozen, and water can not reach the roots of plants; and yet in a few months how changed is every thing! The spring returns, and nature starts up from her grave, and the turtle calls, and the leaf rustles, and the grass grows green, and the flowers open and blush, and form, and motion, and color, and contrast, and variety, all lend their aid to the stock of common joy. The power of the resurrection is there!

Not the least sign of life does the worm in her cell show, where she is changed into a watery substance; not the least promise of any future. The winds rock the little tomb hung upon the limb of a bush, the frosts turn it into solid ice; but the germ of life is there, and she shall hear Him call, and she will answer him, and break out a beautiful insect, brilliant as the rainbow, joyous upo