has been to me as a civet-box, yea, sweeter than all perfumes.  His word I did use to gather for my food, and for antidotes against my faintings.  He has held me up, and I have kept myself from mine iniquities.  Yea, my steps hath He strengthened in the way.”  Now, while he was thus in discourse his countenance changed, his strong man bowed down under him, and after he had said, “Take me, for I come to Thee,” he ceased to be seen of them.  Fore-fancy, if you have the face, an end like that for yourself.

This, then, is how Christian and Hopeful and Christiana and Old Honest and all the rest did in the swelling river.  But the important point is, HOW WILL YOU DO?  Have you ever fore-fancied how you will do?  Have you ever, among all your many imaginings, imagined yourself on your deathbed?  Have you ever thought you heard the doctor whisper, “To-night”?  Have you ever lain low in your bed and listened to the death-rattle in your own throat?  And have you still listened to the awful silence in the house after all was over?  Have you ever shot in imagination the dreadful gulf that stands fixed between life and death, and between time and eternity?  Have you ever tried to get a glimpse beforehand of your own place where you will be an hour after your death, when they are putting the grave-clothes on your still warm body, and when they are measuring your corpse for your coffin?  Where will you be by that time?  Have you any idea?  Can you fancy it?  Did you ever try?  And if not, why not?  “My lord,” wrote Jeremy Taylor to the Earl of Carbery, when sending him the first copy of the Holy Dying,—­“My lord, it is a great art to die well, and that art is to be learnt by men in health; for he that prepares not for death before his last sickness is like him that begins to study philosophy when he is going to dispute publicly in the faculty.  The precepts of dying well must be part of the studies of them that live in health, because in other notices an imperfect study may be supplied by a frequent exercise and a renewed experience; but here, if we practise imperfectly once, we shall never recover the error, for we die but once; and therefore it is necessary that our skill be more exact since it cannot be mended by another trial.”  How wise, then, how far-seeing, how practical, and how urgent is the prophet’s challenge and demand.  “How wilt thou do in the swelling of Jordan?”

1.  Well, then, let us be practical before we close, and let us descend to particulars.  Let us take the prophet’s question and run it through some parts and some practices of our daily life as already dying men.  And, to begin with, I have such a great faith in good books, whether we are to live or die, that I am impelled to ask you all at this point, and under shelter of this plain-spoken prophet, What books have you laid in for your deathbed, and for the weeks and months and even years before your death bed?  What do you look forward to be reading