years, he almost revolutionized and did much to civilize the English system of public education.  When he left Rugby, in December 1841, it was to go to Oxford as professor of Modern History, but his death, June 12th, 1842, left him remembered by the English-speaking world as “Arnold of Rugby.”  He left five volumes of sermons, an edition of ‘Thucydides,’ a ‘History of Rome’ in three volumes, and other works, but his greatest celebrity has been given him by the enthusiastic love which his manly Christian character inspired in his pupils and acquaintances, furnishing as it did the master motive of ‘Tom Brown at Rugby,’ a book which is likely to hold the place it has taken next to ‘Robinson Crusoe’ among English classics for the young.

The sermon here republished from the text given in ’Simons’s Sermons of Great Preachers,’ is an illustration of the eloquence which appeals to the mind of others, not through musical and beautiful language so much as through deep thought and compact expression.

THE REALITIES OF LIFE AND DEATH

“God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”—­Matt. xxii. 32

We hear these words as a part of our Lord’s answer to the Sadducees; and, as their question was put in evident profaneness, and the answer to it is one which to our minds is quite obvious and natural, so we are apt to think that in this particular story there is less than usual that particularly concerns us.  But it so happens, that our Lord, in answering the Sadducees, has brought in one of the most universal and most solemn of all truths,—­which is indeed implied in many parts of the Old Testament, but which the Gospel has revealed to us in all its fullness,—­the truth contained in the words of the text, that “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.”

I would wish to unfold a little what is contained in these words, which we often hear even, perhaps, without quite understanding them; and many times oftener without fully entering into them.  And we may take them, first, in their first part, where they say that “God is not the God of the dead.”

The word “dead,” we know, is constantly used in Scripture in a double sense, as meaning those who are dead spiritually, as well as those who are dead naturally.  And, in either sense, the words are alike applicable:  “God is not the God of the dead.”

God’s not being the God of the dead signifies two things:  that they who are without him are dead, as well as that they who are dead are also without him.  So far as our knowledge goes respecting inferior animals, they appear to be examples of this truth.  They appear to us to have no knowledge of God; and we are not told that they have any other life than the short one of which our senses inform us.  I am well aware that our ignorance of their condition is so great that we may not dare to say anything of them positively; there may be a hundred