in tribulation.  True, we cannot, by any artifice or illusion, make death itself cease to be a curse.  Full of beauty and consolation as it may be,—­nay, we will call it triumphant,—­yet nothing saddens the mind, for the time, more than the sight of true beauty.  In heaven things beautiful will not make us sad; nor will the remembrance of a past joy, which so inevitably has that effect upon us here.  We are beholding a sunset.  Day is flinging up all its treasures, as though it were breaking to pieces its pavilion forever and scattering the fragments; and now, when all seemed past, one more flood of glory streams over the scene, but only for a moment; then comes a last touch of pathos, here and there, like a more distant farewell, a whispered good night.  Have tears never come unbidden, do we never feel sad, at such a time?  Is not the whole of life, past, present, and to come, then tinged with sombre hues? and all because the dying day expires with such beauty and peace.  Not so when a storm suddenly brings in night upon us.  Then we are nerved and braced; we hear no minor key in the voice of the departing day.  It is perfectly natural, therefore, to weep over our dead, even when every thing in their departure is consolatory and beautiful.  It is interesting to observe that it was even when he was on his way to raise the dead body of his friend, and thus to comfort the weeping sisters, that “Jesus wept.”

Let us more and more love the Christian’s grave.  Angels love it.  Two of them sat in the tomb where the body of Jesus had lain—­they loosed the napkin that was about his head, and “wrapped” it “together in a place by itself;” and when Jesus had left the place, instead of following him, they lingered, to comfort the weeping friends on their arrival at the sepulchre.  Can it be Michael, guardian of the dead Moses and his grave, on “the great stone” which has been rolled “from the door of the sepulchre”?  Is he thinking how he will one day hear the command, “Take ye away the stone” which covers all who sleep in Jesus?  As the cross is hallowed by the death of the Son of God upon it, the grave is hallowed for the believer through the Saviour’s burial.  There are three places which must possess intense interest for a glorified friend.  One is his home; another is his seat in the house of God; and another is his grave.  Let us cherish it.  We do well to visit such a spot.  Sometimes approaching it with sadness and fear, we go away with surprising peace; looking back for a last view of the stone, and feeling towards the spot as we do when we are leaving little children in the dark for the night, unutterable love, we find, has cast out fear.  Those graves are treasures which heaven has made sure, “sealing the stone, and setting a watch.”  Of those who still live, we are not certain that, in the providence of God, they will henceforth be an unmingled source of comfort; but they who are in those graves are garnered fruits, are finished works,