CHAP. VI. INEQUALITY IN THE LENGTH AND IN THE HAPPINESS OF MEN'S LIVES. I thought that the course of the pilgrim to heaven There are mansions exempted from sin and from woe, HEBER. As this world is described to be the magnificent theatre on which our Almighty Creator displays to us the wonders of his power, it is also the stage, where we are called on once to act our own parts, without the possibility of any future. repetition. It matters little, for so short a period, whether the part each has to perform be a conspicuous or a subordinate one, provided only it be made the very best of, knowing that we are born but once, and die but once; therefore, if our duties be so mistaken or neglected now as to leave us unready at last, eternity itself cannot rectify the error. No man is intrusted with two souls, nor can he turn the hour-glass when the last grain of sand has run out; but after a lifetime allowed him to prepare for an exchange of worlds, his departure hence is final. Every worldly business if done amiss to-day may perhaps be remedied to-morrow, but the earthly account once closed is closed for ever. While life yet remains, While yet the lamp holds on to burn, the greatest sinner is encouraged and earnestly admonished to plead for pardon, but there is a tide in the concerns of religion, and that last hour is the final crisis. Though justice stands on the one hand ready to cast in her sword against the impenitent sinner, still mercy lingers in sight to the last, willing to rescue him even in the eleventh hour from destruction. The very condition on which we receive life, or any other gift of God, is, that we shall be prepared and satisfied whenever he commands us to resign it. We dwell here in a lodging, and have received notice to quit. We are tenants at will, and must hourly be ready, if summoned by the Master of the house, to relinquish our present home. That hour is on the wing when our lease shall expire, when the time shall come for the schemes of to-day and the hopes of to-morrow to end, when every moment of life shall have been spent that our Creator intended from the beginning we should enjoy. Each living man has, finally, a sickness and a death before him, and how unexpectedly the summons may come most of those now in another world could testify. It is well for the Christian to be found awaiting his expected end like the late pious Mr. Durham, who might be said, in the words of Scripture, to "die daily." On being told by a clergyman that his last hour was at hand, and that now, therefore, he had nothing to do but to die, he answered, with calm satisfaction," I bless God I have not had that to do these many years." "Hark!" cries a voice, that awes the silenced air, "The doom of man in my dread bosom lies, Be yours awhile to pace this vale of care, Be his to soar with seraphs in the skies." Though the number and duration of men be like leaves in a forest, yet, strange to perceive, each individual must learn the lesson for himself, by his own experience, of the uncertainty of life and of all it bestows. However dearly bought, experience is of no use to any one but the owner, while the preacher preaches in vain to those who neither hear nor take heed. Like Cassandra, who had the gift of foretelling future events, but the torture that nobody was ever to believe her prophecies, the Christian minister warns, teaches, and exhorts on the transitory nature and uncertain tenure of human life in vain. He illustrates his instructions with instances which we hear every day, without laying them to heart, and still our thoughts and plans stretch into the long futurity of this world, but stop short of that futurity which is, perhaps, nearer, and undoubtedly more. certain. If the length of every man's life were precisely the same, we should feel so secure in our early years, as to postpone entirely all preparation for departing; but in such a case, towards our latter days the minds of many would become encrusted with melancholy. They would be overwhelmed by contemplating the immediate certainty of their fate, in anticipating which so closely at hand their frame of mind would probably resemble that of a criminal on the eve of execution. "Our lives are not all alike: their length is measured at the will of him who gave them," observes M. Malherbe: "he gathereth the fruit while green, he stays till it be ripe, and he lets it hang till it be rotten. Whatsoever he does, we owe this submission to our Creator, to believe he does nothing unjustly. He does no wrong, neither to them he takes away young, nor to them whom he suffers to grow old. We wonder, perhaps, to see a man who is in a forest fell all the crooked trees, and leave all the straight; but that man having a ship to build, not a house, selects that kind of timber. We have no model of the many mansions in our Father's house, therefore we need not wonder, when he takes in his materials, why he selects the young and leaves the old, or why the sickly outlive those who seem in perfect health." As God then appoints that some flowers shall bloom till December, and others perish in May, long habit has accustomed us to see it so, while no man questions the wisdom or the justice of such a decree; but since we prepare our gardens accordingly, why can we not also prepare our minds, in the conviction that the lives of all men, the lives of our contemporaries, our neighbours, and ourselves, are like flowers of the field, soon, and perhaps very prematurely, to be blighted by the frost of death? "In the gay spring blossom of hope, in the very morning of a religious course, death often sets the seal of eternity on the young, and those who were lovely in life are made perfect in death;" but let the Christian die when he may, even in the earliest dawn of youth, if God has indeed ripened his soul to perfection, he is ready, because fitted for a higher and happier destiny. The rose that lives but a day has fulfilled as entirely its own vocation as the oak that stands for a century: the one blooms as queen of the garden, the other as monarch of the wood; but for both there is an appointed period when |