PERSONAL REMINISCENCES.
The reason I like the gospel is, that it has taken out of my path the worst enemies I ever had. My mind rolls back to twenty years ago, before I was converted, and I think very often how dark it used to seem at times as I thought of the future. There was death—what a terrible enemy it seemed! I was brought up in a little village in New England. It was the custom there when a person was buried to toll out the age of the man at his funeral. I used to count the strokes of the bell. Death never entered that village and tore away one of the inhabitants but I always used to count the tolling of the bell. Sometimes it would be away up to seventy, or between seventy and eighty; beyond the life allotted to man, when man seemed living on borrowed time when cut off. Sometimes it would be clear down in the teens, and childhood, and death would take away one of my own age. It used to make a solemn impression on me; I used to be a great coward. When it comes to death, some men say, “I do not fear it.” I feared it, and felt terribly afraid when I thought of the cold hand of death feeling for the cords of life, and being launched out to eternity, to go to an unknown world. I used to have terrible thoughts of God; but they are all gone now. Death has lost its sting. And as I go on through the world I can shout now, when the bell is tolling, “O death, where is thy sting?” And I hear a voice come rolling down from Calvary, “Buried in the bosom of the Son of God.” He robbed death of its sting; He took the sting of death into His own bosom. If you take a wasp, and just take the sting out of that wasp, you will not be afraid of it any more than you would of a little fly. The sting has been taken out. And you need not be afraid of death if you are in Christ. Christ died for your sin. The penalty, the wages of sin is death. Christ received the wages on Calvary, and therefore there is no condemnation. All that death can get now is this old Adam. I do not care how quickly I get rid of it. I will get a better body, a resurrected body, a glorified body, a body much better than this. Yes, my friends, “To die,” says the apostle, “is gain.”