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ANDOVER THEOL. SENARY

NOV 20 1907

LIBRARY.

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THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY

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PASTOR OF THE BLEECKER STREET PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,
NEW YORK.

THE APPROACH OF DEATH-A NEW YEAR'S SERMON.

"Behold I come quickly."- -REVELATIONS iii. 11. (Firs clause.)

THE hopes, my brethren, which belong to you on the first Sabbath of a New Year, do not contemplate for yourselves.a greater good than do the wishes of him who now addresses you. The object of your hopes may indeed be different from that which my wishes for you respect, but I am sure that you will not compare them, in point of intrinsic worth, or in regard to the certainty and permanency which characterize them respectively.

The state of the human mind, at a season like the present, is for the most part, one of expectation. We have done with the concerns of the old year, and we are awaiting the development of a new one; and turning down the page upon which our previous history has been written, and the lessons of experience have been recorded, we are giving licence to imagination to fill up the sheet upon which reality has not yet traced a letter. I am not wrong in supposing, that this page of the future, as it Dow appears to us, is full of scenes of joy; or, if in any case fear predominates over hope, the faint lines in which it traces its object, and the very undecided shading which it throws. over it, stand in very strong contrast to the bold strokes with

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