Meditations for the Afflicted, Sick and Dying

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1833. Excerpt: ... OF THE VALUE OF A DEATH-BED REPENTANCE. Psalm Ixxvii. 7, 8, 9. Will the Lordcaat offjorever? and will he be favorable no more? Is his mercy clean gone for ever? dolh his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies') There are several distinct questions which are apt to be confounded with each other in discourses on this subject, --and with the separation of which from the chief point to be determined, it is, therefore, proper that we should commence our statements. The question, then, is not, in the first place, whether a person who is in health, and is running a course of vice, may trust to a death-bed repentance. For, I. Sudden and premature deaths are more common, than those which occur after the utmost lapse of the years allotted to human existence has been completed; we, accordingly, see Death every where marking out his victims, and calling the healthy and the vigorous to their last account, much more frequently than those who are bowed down with years and infirmities, --and no man, therefore, whatever may be the strength of his constitution or the measure of health which, at any moment, he enjoys, is entitled to presume that he shall escape the stroke which is cutting off others, with equal advantages, on all sides of him, --or to defer a work of so much importance as that of his preparation for death, on a supposition, which he has so little reason to believe will be justified by the event. 2. Even supposing a man to attain to an extreme old age, or to something approaching to that term which has been assigned to the years of man on this earth, --it is much more probable that the concluding years of such a life will be spent, either in a state of complete exhaustion of all the powers both of...