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. 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 |