the strain which it must have given to the worn-out voice and body of the Dean to deliver it.  The present writer once heard a very eminent Churchman, who was also a great poet, preach his last sermon, at the age of ninety.  This was the Danish bishop Grundtvig.  In that case the effort of speaking, the extraction, as it seemed, of the sepulchral voice from the shrunken and ashen face, did not last more than ten minutes.  But the English divines of the Jacobean age, like their Scottish brethren of to-day, were accustomed to stupendous efforts of endurance from their very diaconate.

The sermon is one of the most “creepy” fragments of theological literature it would be easy to find.  It takes as its text the words from the sixty-eighth Psalm:  “And unto God the Lord belong the issues of death.”  In long, stern sentences of sonorous magnificence, adorned with fine similes and gorgeous words, as the funeral trappings of a king might be with gold lace, the dying poet shrinks from no physical horror and no ghostly terror of the great crisis which he was himself to be the first to pass through.  “That which we call life,” he says, and our blood seems to turn chilly in our veins as we listen, “is but Hebdomada mortium, a week of death, seven days, seven periods of our life spent in dying, a dying seven times over, and there is an end.  Our birth dies in infancy, and our infancy dies in youth, and youth and rest die in age, and age also dies and determines all.  Nor do all these, youth out of infancy, or age out of youth, arise so as a Phoenix out of the ashes of another Phoenix formerly dead, but as a wasp or a serpent out of a carrion or as a snake out of dung.”  We can comprehend how an audience composed of men and women whose ne’er-do-weel relatives went to the theatre to be stirred by such tragedies as those of Marston and Cyril Tourneur would themselves snatch a sacred pleasure from awful language of this kind in the pulpit.  There is not much that we should call doctrine, no pensive or consolatory teaching, no appeal to souls in the modern sense.  The effect aimed at is that of horror, of solemn preparation for the advent of death, as by one who fears, in the flutter of mortality, to lose some peculiarity of the skeleton, some jag of the vast crooked scythe of the spectre.  The most ingenious of poets, the most subtle of divines, whose life had been spent in examining Man in the crucible of his own alchemist fancy, seems anxious to preserve to the very last his powers of unflinching spiritual observation.  The Dean of St. Paul’s, whose reputation for learned sanctity had scarcely sufficed to shelter him from scandal on the ground of his fantastic defence of suicide, was familiar with the idea of Death, and greeted him as a welcome old friend whose face he was glad to look on long and closely.