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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 17

Funeral Service

page 85

Funeral Service

We are assembled, my brethren, to render the last office which the living may minister to the dead.

Man is born to die. The coffin, the grave, the sepulchre, speak to us in terms that cannot be misunderstood, however unheeded it may be, of "Man's latter end." Youth, in its harmlessness and comparative innocency, and manhood in its wonted vigor and pride of strength, are not more exempt than decrepid and tottering age from the fixed law of being, which dedicates all that is mortal to decay and death.

This truth is inscribed in the great volume of nature upon its every page. The beautiful and the sublime which the handiwork of the Creator displays on our every side fearfully associate the unerring certainty of the end of all things, amid the vividness of the moral which they are ever suggesting to the contemplative mind.

Day after day we are called upon to follow our fellow creatures to that "bourne whence no traveller returns;" but from the house of mourning we go forth again to mingle in the crowded world, heedless, perhaps, of the precarious tenure of life, and the certainty of that end to which all flesh is rapidly tending. He who gives to us the vigor of body, without warning, paralyzes the stout heart and strikes down the athletic frame—the living of to-day become the dead of the morrow.

Men appear upon and disappear from the stage of life, as wave meets wave, and parts upon the troubled waters. "In the midst of life we are in death." He whose lips now echo these tones of solemn warning, in turn will be stilled in the page 86 cold and cheerless house of the dead, and in the Providence of God none may escape.

Let us then, so far improve the lesson as to be prepared for that change which leads to life eternal.

We now commit our departed Brother's body to the grave; earth to earth; ashes to ashes; dost to dust.