be neglected; natural affection would crush the higher incentives and restraints of faith; earthly interests would push from our hearts all spiritual concerns; and our tent-home in this vale of tears would be substituted for our heavenly home.  We see, therefore, the benevolent wisdom of God in ordaining bereavements to arrest us from the control of unsanctified natural affection.  When we see the flowers of our household withered and strewn around us; when that which we most tenderly loved and clung to, is taken from us in an unexpected hour, we begin to see the futility of living for earthly interests alone; and we turn from the lamented dead to be more faithful to the cherished and dependent living.

Let us, therefore, remember that in all our afflictions God has some merciful design, the execution of which will contribute to the temporal and eternal welfare of our home.  He designs either to correct us if we do wrong, or to prevent us from doing wrong, or to test our Christian fidelity, or to instruct us in the deep mysteries and meandering ways of human life, and keep before us the true idea of our homes and lives as a pilgrimage.  Nothing, save supernatural agencies, so effectually removes the moral film from our intellectual eye as the hand of bereavement.  Death is a great teacher.  Sources of pensive reflection and spiritual communion are opened, which none but death could unseal.  A proper sense of the spirit-world is developed; life appears in its naked reality; heaven gains new attractions; eternity becomes a holier theme,—­a more cheerful object of thought; the true relation of this to the life to come, is realized; and the presence of the world of the unseen enters more deeply into our moral consciousness.

Though our loved ones are gone, they are still with us in spirit; yea, they are ours still, in the best sense of possession; our relationship with them is not destroyed, but hallowed.  Though absent, they still live and love; and they come thronging as ministering spirits to our hearts; they hover near us, and commune with us.  Though death may separate us from them, it does not disunite us.  Your departed children, though separated from you in body, are still yours, are with you in spirit, and are members of your family.  They represent your household in heaven, and are a promise that you will be there also.  You are still their parents; you are still one family,—­one in spirit, in faith, in hope, in promise, in Christ.  You still dwell together in the fond memories of home, and in the bright anticipation of a coming reunion in heaven.  Oh, with this view of death and with this hope of joining love’s buried ones again, you can gather those that yet remain, and talk to them of those you put, cold and speechless, in their bed of clay; and while their bodies lie exposed to the winter’s storm or to the summer’s heat, you can point the living to that cheering promise which spans, as with an areole of glory, the graves