Useless. The generality of mankind create to themselves a thousand needless anxieties by a vain search after a thing that never was, nor ever will be, found upon earth.

Let us, then, sit down contented with our lot, and in the meantime be as happy as we can in a diligent preparation for what is to come. —T. Adams. ARMAGEDDON “T see the last dark, bloody sunset, I see the dread Avenger’s form; 16 SERMON ILLUSTRATIONS I hear the Armageddon’s onset— But I shall be above the storm.

“There comes a moaning and a sighing, There comes the death-clod’s heavy fall, A thousand agonies of dying— But I shall be above them all.” Avaricr, in Death. A minister relates that one of his parishioners, a faithful attendant upon the services of the church, and a man of considerable wealth, could never be induced to give anything to any benevolent object. On his death-bed he sent for the minister and asked him what he thought would become of him.

He exhorted him to repent, and renounce the world if he would be saved. The miser gazed at his admonisher in amazement. Give up the world, his treasures, he would not. Even then, within a few moments of death, he was grasping the keys to the cabinet which contained his treasures, and held them in his hands concealed under the bed-clothes.

He could not give them up, but death opened his hand. He passed into eternity clutching his keys. Such is the power of avarice, as it sometimes develops when it supplants the love of God in the professor’s heart.

Avarice, Evil of. Avarice isolates man from the great universe and the holy God, deadens the sensibilities to the highest joys, and shuts the soul up in its own dark self, the victim of a thousand miserable suspicions, and the subject of attributes that every generous heart must loathe.