flowing away to corruption, dwell not on that sight, but wait for the recasting.  And be not satisfied with the extent of this illustration, but advance in your thoughts to a still higher point; for the statuary, casting into the furnace a brazen image, does not furnish you in its place a golden and undecaying statue, but again makes a brazen one.  God does not thus; but casting in a mortal body formed of clay, he returns to you a golden and immortal statue; for the earth, receiving a corruptible and decaying body gives back the same, incorruptible and undecaying.  Look not, therefore, on the corpse, lying with closed eyes and speechless lips, but on the man that is risen, that has received glory unspeakable and amazing, and direct your thoughts from the present sight to the future hope.

But do you miss his society, and therefore lament and mourn?  Now is it not unreasonable, that, if you should have given your daughter in marriage, and her husband should take her to a distant country and should there enjoy prosperity, you would not think the circumstance a calamity, but the intelligence of their prosperity would console the sorrow occasioned by her absence; and yet here, while it is not a man, nor a fellow servant, but the Lord Himself who has taken your relative, that you should grieve and lament?

And how is it possible, you ask, not to grieve, since I am only a man?  Nor do I say that you should not grieve:  I do not condemn dejection, but the intensity of it.  To be dejected is natural; but to be overcome by dejection is madness, and folly, and unmanly weakness.  You may grieve and weep; but give not way to despondency, nor indulge in complaints.  Give thanks to God, who has taken your friend, that you have the opportunity of honoring the departed one, and of dismissing him with becoming obsequies.  If you sink under depression, you withhold honor from the departed, you displease God who has taken him, and you injure yourself; but if you are grateful, you pay respect to him, you glorify God, and you benefit yourself.  Weep, as wept your Master over Lazarus, observing the just limits of sorrow, which it is not proper to pass.  Thus also said Paul—­“I would not have you to be ignorant concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not as others who have no hope.  Grieve,” says he; “but not as the Greek, who has no hope of a resurrection, who despairs of a future life.”

Believe me, I am ashamed and blush to see unbecoming groups of women pass along the mart, tearing their hair, cutting their arms and cheeks—­and all this under the eyes of the Greeks.  For what will they not say?  What will they not declare concerning us?  Are these the men who reason about a resurrection?  Indeed!  How poorly their actions agree with their opinions!  In words, they reason about a resurrection:  but they act just like those who do not acknowledge a resurrection.  If they fully believed in a resurrection, they would not act thus; if they had really persuaded themselves that a deceased friend had departed to a better state, they would not thus mourn.  These things, and more than these, the unbelievers say when they hear those lamentations.  Let us then be ashamed, and be more moderate, and not occasion so much harm to ourselves and to those who are looking on us.