of this day, of the appalling promptitude with which our life is hastening to be swallowed up in the abyss of the past.

Disciples of Jesus Christ! this sadness is precious: the melancholy you experience is a subject of joy to us; and the conviction which gives birth to it, is among those salutary impressions which we ought carefully to guard against suffering to be dissipated and effaced. For it is to their readiness to be obliterated, it is to our habitual inattention to the shortness of life, that we must mainly attribute so many hours lost, so much negligence and want of firmness in the discharge of our most sacred duties, so much procrastination to some other day, which has itself its proper task assigned to it, so many chimerical projects with which we foolishly burden the future, and which the future, coming upon us with the speed of lightning, successively defeats.

Let us then endeavour, on the present occasion, to apply to our profit the solemn and melancholy reply, of the Patriarch to Pharaoh, for the purpose of imparting consistency and dura

bility to the impression already produced upon us by the simple fact of the commencement of another year. Let us endeavour to withdraw for ourselves from the class of abstract truths, this idea, that life is short-to give it a palpable and positive reality, and to render it familiar, and from henceforth habitually present to us; so that, as long as our final summons is deferred, so long we may continue to feel the importance of losing no one of those hours which shall be allotted to us, before that hour, known to God alone, when we in our turn shall be called away.

"Pharaoh said unto Jacob, How old art thou? and Jacob said, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years: few and evil have the days of the years of my life been."

You participate, My Brethren, in the astonish ment with which the Egyptian monarch must have heard this reflection; and are unable to reconcile it with the Patriarch's own statement regarding the length of his life, in the preceding words. Had he said only that his pilgrimage had been

marked by crosses and evils, you would readily have comprehended the truth of the assertion. His long and painful disputes with his brother Esau-the harsh conduct of Laban towards himthe dishonour brought upon his family by the outrage offered to Dinah-the bloody vengeance, by means of which his sons endeavoured to wash away this affront-the death of the affectionate Rachel, snatched from him in giving birth to Benjamin-the domestic troubles of which Joseph was the subject-the agonizing loss of that most beloved child of his heart, that stay and comfort of his old age,-all these, are, indeed, afflictions sufficient for a single life; and abundantly account for the sombre colouring which Jacob throws over his career, and for the tone of complaint which escapes him in describing it. When, however, he calls it short-when a man who, in our days, would pass for a prodigy of longevity, tells you that the days of his pilgrimage on earth have been "few,"-this is what you cannot understand; it seems to you false, unjust, or, at least, a strange exagge

ration.

We may suppose the Patriarch thus to explain himself: The years, the months, above all, the days, have often appeared long to me, when passing. While looking forward with earnest desire to the period fixed by Laban for the union in which I had placed my happiness, it sometimes appeared to me that Time suspended his flight, and that I should never arrive at the limit of my wishes. When, on the return of evening, Joseph delayed his appearance at the door of his father's tents, each pulsation of my heart seemed to measure an hour; and when mournful presages forewarned me of his loss, I felt, in the bitterness of my apprehensions, as if I should never see the return of his cruel brethren, which was destined to overwhelm me with despair. Like you, I have experienced the wearisome hours of expectation and anxiety, the long days of pain, and the interminable nights of anguish ; my hair is whiter, my back more bent with age, than yours: not one of you dares look forward, even with a distant hope of attaining to that period which I have reached :—yet, in spite of all this, I repeat-and I repeat it from expe

rience that the days of my pilgrimage have been but of brief duration.

What the Patriarch asserted in regard to his own life, I now proceed to apply to the lives of mankind in general; and though I cannot, like him, refer to the centuries by which my forefathers measured theirs, I repeat, with the Psalmist: "Man is carried away as with a flood: he is as a sleep, as a dream when one awaketh like grass which groweth up: in the evening it is cut down, and withereth." "His days are as an hand-breadth; and verily, every man at his best estate is altogether vanity."

I. Life appears to me short, first, WHEN WE REDUCE IT TO ITS TRUE MEASURE, by subtracting from it all that portion of time which is claimed by the wants incident to our mortal nature, or foolishly lavished upon empty trifles.

Think not, Brethren, that, presumptuously arrogating to myself a right to censure the ways of Providence, I overlook the goodness of God in the various necessities of our mortal nature: mistake not my meaning so far as to suppose