HINDOSTAN AND ITS WOES, 465 of filth and pollution. The plague begins its ravages, and thousands die. The survivors flee from the spot; but they carry death to their homes-they spread over the country, and wretchedness unutterable seems to follow in their train. Cholera comes next to glean what the plague has spared. Whole villages are left without an inhabitant; and over a wide-spread territory the angel of death seems to brood, with none to disturb his reign. The mortality occasioned by the pilgrimage of single year to Jugurnaut ranges from ten to twenty thousand; and then the scene is so full of horror, that humanity shrinks appalled. Dead bodies in every stage of decay are there. The soil is black with the ashes of funeral-piles for the dead and the living. The bleached bones of pilgrims lie scattered all around. The smell of wasted human flesh threatens to stifle the visitor, for the stench from decaying corpses is suffocating. The wild dogs and the vultures, sated to inactivity, crowd the horrid scene-and yet death amid such a scene is leemed "entering into Elysium," or "the gates of heaven." This is also done in the prostituted name of religion; but is it not a proof that the way of transgressors is hard? "Be sure your sin will find you out," is the announced decree of God; and it is sometimes verified in a way which illustrates our present subject. The sin of intoxication is again and again pointed out in Scripture, as excluding men from glory; and yet it is one of the vices into which tens of thousands rush in spite of every warning. Now, is it not a striking fact, that the victims of that vice have sometimes actually taken fire? They have been consumed, science cannot yet tell us how, by spontaneous combustion; and passed into eternity amid flames kindled by their own right hand. Is it not a strange but significant exhibition of the wages of sin? Is it not nature enforcing the lessons of revelation, or telling, in letters of fire, the sad experience of the wicked? * Clarkson's India and the Gospel, pp. 148, 149. 466 THE DOUBLE DEATH. With the Word of God for a key to explain such things, we see how significantly He proclaims that the wages of sin is death-it may be a double death in one. Lord Byron's history supplies another example. He declined to be ranked among those infidels "who deny the Scriptures, and wish to remain in unbelief." Nay, it is recorded in his life, that he professed "himself desirous to believe, as he experienced no happiness in having his religious opinions so unfixed." He was unable, he confessed, "to understand the Scriptures; but those who conscientiously believed them he could always respect, and was disposed to trust in them more than others; but he had met with so many whose conduct differed from the principles which they professed, and who seemed to profess those principles either because they were paid to do so, or from some other motive which an intimate acquaintance with their character would enable one to detect, that altogether he had seen few if any whom he could rely upon as truly and conscientiously believing the Scriptures." Such appears to have been the farthest that Lord Byron could go; and it will be seen how fallacious were the principles of his judgment. He tried the Scriptures by men, and not men by the Scriptures. The sphere in which he moved was one from which vital religion was wellnigh banished; and yet, by those whom he occasionally met in that sphere, he tested the truth of God. "He could not understand the Scriptures." True; but had he sat down to study them, they would have taught him both how to understand and how to delight in them. "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak of myself." But the yearnings of Lord Byron's nature for something more satisfying than aught he had ever enjoyed, are full of meaning: they prove to us again that the way of transgressors is hard. Or farther, when Mrs Sheppard recorded her touching prayer on his lordship's behalf, and when that prayer was transmitted by her widowed husband, Byron wrote: LORD BYRON-RICHARD B. SIIERIDAN. 467 "I can assure you that all the fame which ever cheated humanity into higher notions of its own importance, would never weigh in my mind against the pure and pious interest which a virtuous being may be pleased to take in my welfare. In this point of view, I would not exchange the prayer of the deceased in my behalf for the united glory of Homer, Cæsar, and Napoleon, could such be accumulated upon a living head." Groping thus, and deeply moved, it seems as if he were not far from the kingdom of heaven; but even his powers could not effect an entrance there, and is not his confession one of the most significant ever made by selfdeceived and self-ruined man? This noble nature, bowed to the earth by the effects of sin, was seeking there what he could find only in the God of heavenand amid all the sad and solemn moral wrecks which the history of the past exhibits, few are more saddening than the spectacle of Byron, now indulging in deep emotion over the supplications of a child of God on his behalf, and anon relapsing into the downward course which he had so fatally pursued. The life and death of Richard Brinsley Sheridan is one of the most instructive in the history of our land. Half-a-century ago, he was perhaps the most brilliant orator of our most brilliant period. Thousands hung enchained and enraptured on his lips. His wit was as keen as his eloquence was great. His power as a dramatist was inferior to neither. He sat at the right hand of royalty, and, in short, gleamed like a meteor among his fellow-men. Yet, what was he as a moral being? At all times unprincipled at length a bloated drunkard, drowned in debt-deserted by his once obsequious friends-the embodiment of wretchedness and wostretched on a miserable pallet, from which he hourly expected to be borne away to prison, the worn-out worldling ended his days, without a friend to close his dying eye with scarcely one to weep beside his grave. He had worshipped the world's god, and he reaped the result. He had tried to find happiness in violating the will of the Supreme; and as his brilliant powers had been wasted in wickedness, the penalty was wo and tribulation. He fed upon ashes, and had the water of wormwood to drink. This is the sum of the whole matter: The believer in Christ has communion with his reconciled God; the unpardoned sinner must, sooner or later, commune with his own irritated and accusing conscience. A believer in Christ has consented, under the power and demonstration of the Spirit, to obey the primary law of his being, and find his centre of repose or his happiness in God; the unpardoned sinner seeks his happiness in contending with Omnipotence. The experience of the one is, therefore, a foretaste of heaven; the kingdom of God is within him; he is at least on his way back to Eden; -the experience of the other is a prelude to misery eternal; for as holiness is the embryo of everlasting blessedness, sin is the germ of perdition. Let that bud expand, and its fruit is the second death. CHAPTER XL. An Irreligious Old Age. "The chamber where the good man meets his fate Of virtuous life,-quite on the verge of heaven. That threw in this Bethesda your disease. . . . YOUNG. |