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(Don't let the soft title of this sermon fool you. It's by Robert Lewis Dabney. Dabney was a writer that could rival Herman Melville (they were contemporaries). He has a similar ability to tear open reality and reach heights bordering on vision. In this sermon he is particularly good at describing the experience of death in its aspect of being a solitary experience for the dying person (solitary in the flesh that is). The theology is both straight and orthodox yet with bold - and to my discernment on-the-mark - differenences from more comformist theologians of the same stripe (Calvinist). The description of this sermon is this: "Dabney preached this sermon on August 25, 1861 in the woods of Virginia, for Stonewall Jackson, his officers, and men." That would be, of course, during the American Civil War. Dabney was first a Chaplain then Chief-of-Staff for General Jackson. I can't state in strong enough language how great this sermon is, on many levels. Sermons, as a genre, are usually predictably boring and long-winded. This one is not in that category. Again, it reads like it could have been written by Melville, yet it sets forth Biblical truth on the subject of death and dying and is bold in the areas of those subjects it ventures into.)
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