image of God supplanted by the image of him whose service they preferred to that of a holy God and Saviour.  What a moment will that be, when the sinner’s grave is opened by the last trumpet, and a hideous form rises to receive a frantic spirit!  “The harvest is the end of the world, and the reapers are the angels.”  “As, therefore, the tares are gathered and burned in the fire, so shall it be in the end of this world.  The Son of man shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth.”  “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”  There will be separations at the graves of those who lay side by side in death; many a tomb will yield up subjects both for heaven and for hell; the differences in character, between the regenerate and unregenerate, will there be made conspicuous in the correspondence of the risen body to the soul, according as the soul shall have arrived at the grave from a state of joy or of woe.  Arrests will be made, there will be forcible detentions, overpowering strength, disregard of entreaties, remorseless rendings asunder of families, unclasping of embraces, and an indiscriminate mixture of all classes among the wicked, indicated by the command, “Bind ye the tares together, in bundles, to be burned.”  Nor will this be worse for holy angels to witness, than it was to see those sinners turn their backs on the Lord’s supper, year after year.  They could treat their Saviour’s dying agonies, and his blood, with perfect neglect and contempt, through their love of the world and sin; now they eat the fruit of their own way, and are filled with their own devices.  Our treatment of the Saviour will return upon our own heads.  What a change will be made in the ideas which many sentimentalists had of holy angels, when they see them executing the terrible orders of their King! and what an illustration it will give of the severity of justice,—­the rigors of its execution being compatible with the pure benevolence of holy angels, because of God.  We are constantly admonished that the punishment of the wicked will be a great part of the proceedings on that day.  It is called “the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.”  “Behold, the Lord cometh, with ten thousands of his saints, to execute judgment.”

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All this serves to invest the death of a dear Christian friend, in our thoughts, with inexpressible peace and comfort.  He, with his Redeemer, can say, “My flesh, also, shall rest in hope.”  If we are confident that a friend is gone to be with Christ, death is, even now, swallowed up of life; and now the thought of what the soul is to inherit, both before and after the resurrection, and its contrast with the experience of the lost, should make us joyful