Go To The Church-Yard

Isaac Watts | Added: Oct 16, 2025 | Category: Theology

What a multitude of beings, noble creatures, are here reduced to dust! God has broken his own best workmanship to pieces, and demolished by thousands the finest earthly structures of His own building. Death is entered in, and reigned over this town for many successive centuries; it had its Commission from God, and it has devoured multitudes of men.

What a number of hillocks of death appear all round us! What are the tombstones, but memorials of the inhabitants of that town, to inform us of the period of all their lives, and to point out the day when it was said to each of them, ‘Your time shall be no longer’. O, may I readily learn this important lesson, that my turn is hastening too; such a little hillock shall shortly arise for me in some unknown spot of ground, it shall cover this flesh and these bones of mine in darkness, and shall hide them from the light of the sun, and from the sight of man till the heavens be no more. Perhaps some kind surviving friend may engrave my name, with the number of my days, upon a plain funeral stone, without ornament, and below envy: there shall my tomb stand among the rest as fresh monument of the frailty of nature and the end of time. 

It is possible some friendly foot may now and then visit the place of my repose, and some tender eye may bedew the cold memorial with a tear: one or another of my old acquaintance may possibly attend there to learn the silent lecture of mortality from my grave-stone, which my lips are now preaching aloud to the world: and if love and sorrows should reach so far, perhaps while his soul is melting in his eyelids, and his voice scarce finds an utterance, he will point with his finger, and show his companion the month and the day of my decease. O, that solemn, that awful day, which shall finish my appointed time on earth, and put a final period to all the designs of my heart, and all the labours of my tongue and pen!

Think, O my soul, that while friends or strangers are engaged on that spot, and reading the date of my departure hence, thou will be fixed under a decisive and unchangeable sentence, rejoicing in the rewards of time well improved, or suffering the longer sorrows which shall attend the abuse of it, in an unknown world of happiness or misery.

Go to the church-yard, then, O sinful and thoughtless mortal; go learn from every tombstone, and every rising hillock, that ‘The wages of sin is death’. Learn in silence, among the dead, that lesson which infinitely concerns all the living; nor let thy heart be ever at rest, till thou art acquainted with Jesus, who is the Resurrection and the Life.

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