of years in Thy hands, time itself must obey Thee; ah, give me one hour of life, till to-morrow, that I may prepare for the long journey into eternity; but all your crying will be of no avail; you will not obtain a single moment more. If you are not prepared when the time comes, so much the worse for you; death will not wait. “The days of man are short, and the number of his months is with Thee.”[1] “Thou hast appointed his bounds which cannot be passed.”
Nor amend any mistake we may make in it. In temporal matters, if one makes a mistake the first time, he can be on his guard the second time and repair his former error. If you have lost a lawsuit and suffered injury thereby, you can make up for the loss by redoubled diligence. But if you have once made a mistake in death, there is no chance of coming back to amend it. If you have lost the suit of your eternal salvation, because you did not prepare in time, you have lost it without any possibility of regaining it. Even if one makes a mistake in matters concerning his eternal salvation during life, there is still time to recover what has been lost. If to-day I were to make a sacrilegious confession, either through want of proper preparation, or because I have not true sorrow for my sins, or because I have concealed a sin wilfully, that would be truly a great evil, great enough to expose me to the danger of damnation; but yet I must not despair; to-morrow or even to-day I can go to confession again, and free my soul from the evil. But if I am so unfortunate as to die an unhappy death, I cannot come back any more, but must remain forever in the state in which death has found me.
Therefore we should prepare for it our whole lives long. What follows from this, my dear brethren? That since our salvation or damnation depends on our death; since we cannot hope for anything greater than salvation, or dread and fear anything more than damnation; the most important, nay, the only business we have to attend to during life, the one end to which should be directed all our thoughts and cares, should be to die a happy death; and hence we must at all times use our utmost diligence in preparing to die well, and be always ready for the hour when the Lord will come to take us. Seneca, although he was a heathen, maintained that the importance of dying well is so great that a man’s whole occupation during life should consist in learning how to die. “During our whole lives we should
- ↑ Breves dies hominis sunt; numerus mensium ejus apud te est.—Job xiv. 5.
