THOMAS ERPINGHAM was a horologer, dwelling adjacent to London Bridge, in the year of grace 1548. He was enthusiastic in his art, and hotly upheld among his acquaintance the unapproachable dignity of his science, over all the other mysteries and crafts of the city companies. He maintained that horology was, in some sense, a religious art. Inside his shop, there were painted on the wall, in golden letters, surrounded with sundry appropriate devices, these words from Matthew Tyndal's Bible

Teache us so to number our dayes, that we may apply our hearts unto wisedome.

And always, when a ghostly cnstomer came, whether he were a favourer of the old or of the new learning, would Thomas Erpingham hint at his own, as remotely allied to the clerkly profession, using the while, reverential and becoming speech, as it were beseeching his listener's assent. In a turret, on the roof of his house, the horologist had placed a clock, in part to publish his craft, but mainly for the spiritual edification of his neighbours. By his inquiries from the city sexton he had ascertained the daily mortality of the metropolis; and very diligent he was in disseminating the information so that all his friends might understand the precise

intensity of the warning, which his clock struck through the neighbourhood every hour.

Many of Thomas Erpingham's acquaintance denied all connection between the dial and godliness, much to his annoyance. But such perverseness is not rare. The Scandinavians heard nothing terrible in the thunder; they thought it was noise made by their northern gods, while playing at bowls. The trifling make all things frivolous, else, in these times, a house clock might be more suggestive of piety than any household god ever was. It is not destitute of sublime associations. All the first chronometers appear to have been sacerdotal inventions, always excepting that earliest and holiest, the sidereal one. The first measurement of time was a divine ordinance; for it was God who said, on the fourth morning of creation, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven, to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years." The figures on the dial correspond with solar altitudes: in Venice, the circumference of its face is the sun's course in miniature; and everywhere the swing of the pendulum regulates the footfall of time, and the stealthy pace also of the last enemy, which is death. It is a good horological motto, "there is a time for all things ;" and, like Ecclesiastes, in his list of twenty-eight particulars, it is good to enumerate in the very first clause, "a time to die." But in this forethought most mortals fail; for, commonly, they never recollect a time to die, till the last period of their existence, till they are so diseased and despairing, as that, instead of the hours, the clock appears to them to strike the terrific warning, "Thou fool, this night

There is a preacher in the belfry, as well as in the pulpit-unimpassioned but indefatigable. Long-buried and fresh corpses lie around him; and across these dead bodies does the iron tongue of time preach to the living audience beyond. All the faces in the church-yard are turned upwards; the spire above them points with its finger into heaven; and often do the tombs echo to the sermon which time preaches out of the tower, especially at the midnight peroration. But there is no attention, nor hearing, nor knowledge in the grave. Under the

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church-yard is silence, never to be broken but by the voice of the last trumpet. We all bewail bitterly, and sometimes with an agony of sorrow, the sleep of death and yet it is but little harder than the sleep of the world, and is not nearly so awful. Wisdom lifteth up her voice in the streets; and is commonly as unheeded, as if the streets were alleys in a grave-yard: and, indeed, they are not unlike. For, in every street, and on either side, many have a name that they live, and are dead. Outside the church-yard walls, and throughout every town, there is a worse decay than that of mortality-a more horrible putrescence than the rotting of a corpse -that of the passions in their loathsomeness, that of a soul suffered by its human owner to see corruption. Years before his body has Christian burial, does many a citizen permit a golden grave to be dug for his spirit, and allow Mammon to read diabolical service over his dead and buried conscience. Wretched men that they are! Who shall deliver them from the body of that death? Thank God, there is a Saviour that can! And what does that Saviour say?" Watch, therefore, for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of Man cometh." Are your eyes heavy with worldly slumber? Think how such slumber may become the sleep of the grave, and shudder at the thought! Think of the encoffined, helpless, and unconscious dead, and thank God that you yourself are yet alive! Think how they lie in the cold ground, with closed eyes, and faces upturned to the world above! Think how the funeral bell swings above their heads, announcing, from time to time, an addition to their silent numbers; and they neither mourn nor rejoice. From the church-steeple every midnight does Time make proclamation all around, that the world is another day nearer to its doom. But of the buried multitude below none ever hear the terrific notice. To them it is not addressed; for them it is not intended; to them it is of no use. Thou that hast ears to hear, do thou hear.

The bell strikes One. We take no note of time
But from its loss: to give it then a tongue

Is wise in man. As if an angel spoke,

I feel the solemn sound. If heard aright,

It is the knell of my departed hours.-YOUNG.

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But let us not deem too mournfully of death. Bless God.-Thou canst not? Then beseech grace, that thou mayest bless God for the grave. There the times and the wicked cease from troubling, and the world-weary are at rest. Yes, ye righteous, at the very least ye are at peace. There was once a Pope-it was John the 22d -who was of opinion that, till the end of the world, only the souls of the martyrs enjoy the Beatific Vision. The angry king of France flung his sword into the infallible scales, and the opposite notion was weighted with orthodoxy then. But whether the king or the pope were right, this at least is certain, that the weary are at rest. The lapse of revolutions, and ages, and centuries, and all time, is to them no more than a moment.

Did God and their salvation permit, there are those who could covet speedy possession of the earth beside you, oh, ye buried and beloved ones! And that not from callousness of feeling, but possibly far otherwise! For there are hearts that long for the cold grave, as a refuge from the chill, and blight, and coldness of common life.

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We may

not wish for death; but, God be thanked that grave is no longer repulsive to us Christians! Thank God, and Christ, the Son of God, for the sure and certain hope, which everywhere springs heavenward from the lowliest grave! The God of the living and the dead likewise be thanked for that power over us survivors which the departed still retain! There is no object so common, but, in our eyes, it acquires some sacredness by its owner's death. "In memory of the dead" these are consecrating words of more than episcopal power. Whether in affliction, or out of it, widows and orphans are always subjects of reverence; and it is not as being defenceless merely; spirits have been thought to surround them with their presence. This may be doubted; but certainly the helpless state of the fatherless and the widowed is often their strong defence. Orphanism is spiritual panoply; it is suggestive of such solemn, sacred thoughts, as disarm the cruel, and enlist the feelings of the kind. The very names of the dead are strengthening. Their memories are tearful, but sweet also and blessed. No flowers, whether ga

thered at the full or any other moon, have such virtue as the forget-me-nots which grow on the grave of a friend. In any hour of trial, gather but one, and thou wilt find thy agony assuaged, thy passion purified, and through thy whole spirit a peace diffused, congenial, sweet, a blessed earnest of heaven.

Gifted with the glorious gospel of Christ, it is for a divine end that we have this treasure in earthen vessels. There is wise purpose in the very mortality of that tenement, which is made the repository of immortal hope. We spirits enter the universe of life, enveloped in a veil of flesh-frail clothing, weak defence, wherein to withstand stormy elements, and the wear and tear of human life! But its very insufficiency is intended; it has a use. Spiritual strength is wrought out in bodily weakness; Christian worth, like Christ's own self, is made perfect through suffering; and eternal ages can come to be esteemed as true treasure, only by those who have been so taught to number their days, as to apply their hearts unto wisdom.

We are wonderfully made, and fearfully and feebly also! There is no other known way of learning the lessons of nature, how manifold they are, from minute instruction up to stupendous revelation !-No other mode of sharing in human experience; no other known medium of thought or feeling than through the agency of these eyes and ears, the other senses and the brain. If a disembodied spirit might, in all probability, it could not profit by the world, its wisdom, or its scenes. The soul's salvation depends somewhat on its tenure of the body. We have no longer time for improvement than while we can keep this covering of "vile members" about us. It is only in contact with earth that preparation for heaven goes on. The consciousness of mortality is not necessarily depressing. It is given us to infuse earnestness into thought, and into and throughout the soul, a solemn, quickening sense of dependence upon God. Man's feet are created subject to palsy and the deadening effect of old age, that they may take hold of the path of life the more gladly. The right hand may and will forget its cunning; and it is, therefore, that whatsoever it findeth to do should be done with the greater