we shall pass through life safely, and prosperously, and with as little experience of evil as wisdom can ensure, in a world where wisdom does not reign alone. — The sum, and glory of these individual improvements, is a rich progress in Christian wisdom. A mind beautifully inlaid with the thoughts of Angels, and wrought about with the signs, and marks of Heaven. Bear this yoke for a while, when you are young, that you may be free when you are old; that you may walk through life unmanacled by passions, unchained by lusts, spurning the lash of Satan, and deriding the bondage of sin; that you may come to that holy, and happy land, where no yoke is borne; where the souls of just men are illumined with amazing glory, and compassed round about by the holiness of God.

ON

SELF-EXAMINATION.

SERMON XXIII.

PSALMS XC. VERSE IX.

We spend our years, as it were a tale that is told.

WHEN We hear a story pleasantly set forth, in appropriate language, and with wellcontrived incidents, the mind hangs upon it eagerly, and falls from a certain heighth of enjoyment, when it is concluded: there is no sense of the passage of time; but the wit, and genius of the narrator abridges it to the duration of a moment; so it is with the years of the rich, and great; they are spent as a tale that is pleasantly told; there is no monotony in the events, no slowness c c

VOL. L.

in the succession; novelty ever refreshes the fable, and genius ever adorns it; on a sudden, the noise is all hushed, the tale is told; our years are brought to an end, and the silence of death succeeds.

I seize then with some eagerness, upon the occasion which the conclusion of the year presents, to press upon you the duty of self-examination, and to protest against that life which is past without pause, and without reflection.

It is these artificial divisions of time, which teach men to think of its rapid pace; whenever the idea of change is introduced, there comes with it that melancholy, which is the parent of virtue; the mind is carried on from one vicissitude to another, till it. stops, and trembles at the last; now it is, that our thoughts are more than ordinarily serious; now it is that we listen to the lowly breathings of conscience, that we remember that this world is not the last scene of existence, that we catch a distant glimpse of the grave: how blest are they who hear from that conscience the voice of