current of changes to which he is subject, in which he so intimately shares, and by which he is to be so permanently affected; the steady and unintermitted action of causes within him and without him, all tending to some final result-this to the eye of meditation is far more imposing and solemn than the rare though striking incidents of life. Such a theme befits the present hour. It is appropriate to the instructive suggestions of the closing, and the opening year.

The general fact of change with the progress of our years, admits of no denial. Who in this audience is now in all respects just what he was one year ago? To whom is the past year a perfect blank, leaving him exactly where it found him, with not a solitary trace to show that he ever enjoyed such a period? To whom has it been nothing but a mere lapse of time? This is true of none; and if not so for a single year, then most certainly not for that longer term which measures our sojourn on earth. The truth is, we are constantly changing. Every moment, like every year, leaves its mark behind it. Though the foot of time fall ever so noiselessly upon our path, still the impress is there; and it is well to remember that it is not so much by sudden and startling phenomena as by the continued succession of little events, that great results are accomplished in the bosom of our existence. We are apt to be insensible to the amazingly productive power of these little changes. They are so regular in their occurrence, multitudes of them so much unnoticed at the moment, and some of them so entirely beyond our control, and without our agency, that it is only by collecting the results into an aggregate that we become the affected observers of what has transpired. To-day is like yesterday; yesterday is like its predecessor; and a day is such a common article, that, except by a special effort, we fail to notice the progress of our years, or the vastly important impress which it leaves upon our being. Could we, however, retrace our steps, and give back to each moment what it gave to us, detaching the effect from ourselves, and reinstating it in the bosom of its cause; could we then assemble these fleeting moments, each loaded with some relic of our history, and labeled with its peculiar contribution to our present state; perchance we might, by passing the eye up and down the group, form some idea of "the times" which have passed over us,--of the multitudinous agencies at work within us and upon us, ever repeating their own action, and adding some new item to the texture and fashion of our progressive life. Such a vision, could it be taken, would make us almost doubtful of our own identity. Change, change, nothing but change, would salute the eye from all points of the mental horizon. It is marvellous that man can be so wonderfully altered in the course of a few years; and yet remain essentially the same being. It is marvellous that such a varied series of events can be crowded into so small a compass. Truly, man is "fearfully and wonderfully made," bearing the signature of God in his endowments, and containing the elements of a great destiny in their history.

This general statement of life's changing current, will perhaps address our minds with more power, if we pause to observe some of the particulars which it embraces. To these let me then invite your attention.

I. Time makes a deep of our complex nature.

mark upon the body, the least important portion This truth appears at a glance. Look into any

Let

community; and how readily we classify its members under certain denominations, which bear impressive testimony to the work of time. Here are those whom we call infants, just entered upon the scene of life, of all animated creatures the most helpless, and aside from the lessons of experience giving least promise for the future. They will not long retain their present condition. Coming into existence impressed with the law of development and growth, they will soon cease to be what they now are. time touch their susceptible nature, adding thereto the effects of its plastic hand, and they will be moulded into children; the physical imbecilities of infancy will disappear, and these once helpless objects be ready for the sports and gambols of early life. Add a little more time, and they have passed on to the stature and comparative maturity of persons in the full prime and activity of ardent and hopeful youth. Subjoin another measure of time, and they are men and women in the strong and well developed vigor of completed manhood, having reached the acme of their physical being, and become ripe for the stern and laborious pursuits of life. Add another quantity of time, and the work of decay has begun its desolating ravages. The process once commenced, goes forward with increasing rapidity, till life becomes a burden, and the wearied frame at last drops into the dust under the accumulated infirmities of its own continuance. Hence, the difference between infancy and childhood, childhood and youth, youth and manhood, between the latter and old age, is simply a question of time. "The times" as they pass over us, create these wide and impressive variations in our physical condition. The particular point that we occupy in the series, is to be determined by the number of years that we have lived.

We are quite familiar with this succession of changes, so much so as perhaps hardly to give it a thought; and yet when we pause for reflection, we cannot fail to see a most solemn procession of events, steadily advancing in a line parallel with the progress of our years. The powers which "the times" give and mature, they take away: the edifice which they rear with such careful and prolonged agency, they demolish; they develop and dissolve, ripen and blast, with equal certainty, bringing to perfection the very being they mean to destroy. The creature that goes up for a season, no sooner reaches the altitude than he begins to go down, increasing in the momentum till his grave opens and covers him from human sight. In both directions, the process is slow and silent; yet the effect keeps accumulating till it amounts to the total reality, which to the eye of thought is a most wonderful fact.

Nor should we forget that over our entire path from the first moment to the last, is always suspended the possibility of death. Comparatively few of our race pass through all the stages of life. What multitudes fall in infancy and early childhood! How thin the ranks of the aged by reason of early deaths! That event, which "is the last of earth," is the liability of every moment. When it will come, to whom, and how, and where, is known only to Him in whom we live, and move, and have our being. Let us ever remember this impressive and solemn liability, as we proceed in the journey of life.

II. Equally marked is the effect of " the times" as they pass over us, upon our intellectual nature. We have minds as well as bodies; and by

their peculiar qualities are distinguished from the brute that perisheth, being fitted to rise far above the sphere of animal existence here, and destined to rise still higher hereafter. Man is an incarnate spirituality, mind and matter, the material and the spiritual, in intimate relation with each other. His body is but the casket, the tabernacle, the temporary home and convenience of the spirit, in which consists by far the largest part of his significance. When the one returns to the earth as it was, the other returns to the God who gave it.

The history of our purely intellectual nature from the commencement to the terminus of our present career, the changes to which it is subject, and the great advancement which it makes, are much more remarkable than the physical phenomena of our being. We are apt to note only the more striking developments of intelligence; and yet the mind of the commonest man, if we consider the point of its departure and the limited period of its expansion, is a wonder by the amount of its progress. Where did it begin? Where was it, and what was it, but a few years since? The little infant that you caress with so much fondness, knows almost nothing; it can neither appreciate your feelings, nor form the remotest idea of its own destiny as an intellectual being. What it is to be?whence it came? and whither it is going?-these are questions that come not within the field of its thoughts. Judging from what it is in the outset, without reference to what we infer by the light of experience, we should never suppose the infant to be a miniature of the future man. The two as compared, present so many broad contrasts, and seem so vastly unlike, that but for experience we should not have the faintest conjecture that we were looking upon the same being, or that such a stupendous alteration upon the face of intelligence could be made in so short a time. The truth is, that even a common man, having nothing to distinguish him from the crowd, and knowing about as much as his neighbors, and no more, is a rapidly developed giant, so much in advance of what he once was, as to have lost nearly every mark of intellectual identity. It is not possible for him to retrace his own history, and recount the millions of little operations by which his present condition is connected with his former one; yet nature and time have been steadily occupied in turning the infant into a man. Considering the brevity of the process, the utter destitution of knowledge with which it began, and then the actu al progress made in the space of a few years, well may we be astonished at the spontaneous growth of the human intellect-that growth which the forces of nature necessitate almost without our effort. It indicates a species of immensity, compressed, and so to speak, laid up in the structure of man's soul.

We are, however, more likely to appreciate the contrast produced by the hand of time, when contemplating minds of remarkable qualities, highly gifted by nature, eminently favored by Providence, and intensely charged with the exciting stimulus of some commanding pursuit,-the three circumstances that ordinarily unite in the formation of a great man. Washington the infant, and Washington the hero and the statesman! Is it possible that we are looking upon the same person? We are. We can follow the man of so much historic grandeur down to the crude and undeveloped elements that lie slumbering in the bosom of a child, without a solitary indication of their wonderful future. All the striking contrasts

that we observe, have arisen from "the times" that have passed over the infant Washington. Observe a Newton in his cradle; and how unlike the same being, in a few short years expanded to the dimensions of the illustrious philosopher, and dazzling the world with the restless energies of thought! Who would have supposed that the infant, judged by the then existing appearances, could have ever handled orbs and marshalled suns, dashing off into the fields of immensity, defining and demonstrating the laws of the material universe? Have we the same being in the two cases? Exactly so. We can trace the philosopher back to his cradle, too ignorant to know even his mother, and too feeble to support his own frame. What capacities are there unseen, waiting for the successive changes of time and nature to unfold their glories! How broad the intellectual space between the infant Napoleon, sleeping in his mother's arms, and the same Napoleon charged with the terrible genius of war, and grasping the fate of empires in his hand! "The times" have passed over the former, and changed him into the latter.

Thus we see that time is the great interpreter of the human intellect, showing us what it is, for what God has made it, and to what it can at

tain.

And if such vast changes may occur in so short a time; if a being of apparently so little promise, may so soon acquire such mental magnitude; if there be that in man which admits of such a work in the limited period that lies between his first and last breath; ah! if these things be so, who then can compute his intellectual prospects for a boundless immortality? The facts, as we observe them on earth, are prophetic of an eminence, a vastness, a progress and acquisition of the future thinking being, that transcend all our efforts at measurement. The times as they pass over us, not only decipher the contents within us for present purpobut equally point forward to what we shall be, when the hindrances of flesh and blood are laid aside in the grave. They reveal the glories of our intellectual constitution, demonstrating, upon the diagram of events, gifts that are fitted for an immortal range. We see the glimmerings of the future man, as we contemplate the history of the present one. We see capacities given that, in a proper development, may fulfil those precious promises with which the Bible makes eternity luminous, and heaven so attractive.

ses;

III. Not less striking or important is the stamp of time upon the history of our sensibilities. Man is neither all body, nor all intellect. What we call feeling, or sensibility, and that, too, under almost endless modifications, is as much a part of our nature as thinking. Who does not know what it is to have a feeling-to be thrilled with emotion, or burn with the ardor of restless desire? Who is not competent to distinguish such a state from one that is purely intellectual? Every man has science enough for so simple a task. Feeling is an original element of our exist

ence.

In the outset of life, our sensibilities are almost wholly locked up; the emotions and desires, propensities and affections, dispositions and aversions, that are to be wrought into the structure of the future man, are hardly in the bud; and yet time, in the regulated order of nature, and by the appropriate objects, will bring all this subtle and sensitive mechanism into action, fashioning the man of feelings as well as of thoughts. The

susceptibility is the original gift of God; its laws come from the same source; but its development is the work of time. God made the mysterious harp, and gave to each string its peculiar note; but "the times," as they pass over us, are commissioned to awaken the music of our sentient

nature.

It is doubtless true also, that the native susceptibilities of all men are the same; so that no one ever had a feeling which, in its kind, was absolutely peculiar to himself, and could not without a miracle have occurred in any mind but his own. This must be true, or there could be no science upon the subject applicable to the race. The same desires, the same emotions, the same native affections, the same classes of sensibility, and the same general laws of development, are the common inheritance of the species. In this respect what one mind is, that all minds are. Each is a pattern of the whole race. If you say that you have been happy, then let me assure you, that your neighbors also have been happy; and from experience know what the word means as well as you do. If you have been sorrowful, then remember that others are not strangers to the idea of sorrow. If strong desires have moved you to action, others have felt the same impulse. If hope has built her bower on your path, think not that you are the only beings who have enjoyed the pleasures of hope. If you have been enraptured with the beauties of nature, so, too, have others relished the magic of the same power. The truth is, every essential and original feeling, which it is possible for any one to have, is the property of the race. What God has given to one, that he has given to all and hence we are able to comprehend and verify the experience of others in the facts of our own.

Yet, though not in contradiction of the above statement, how wide a diversity in development and combination, marks the history of human feeling! How far is it from an even monotone! How variously the same heart has been exercised during the space of seventy years! Sometimes it has been swollen with bitter anguish, and at others leaping with joy; sometimes buoyant with hope, and at others jaded with disappointment; sometimes glowing with love, and perhaps at others fired with rage. Man would be a curious spectacle to himself, if he could daguerreotype upon his intelligence a perfect image of his own feelings, as they lie scattered here and there along the path of life-an image that should give all the hues and shadings of the total reality, blending each item with the whole, and yet leaving each so distinct as to be seen by itself. He would be astonished at the sight; and could hardly think himself the identical person who had passed through so many phases and multitudinous combinations of feeling, indeed that so many tunes could have been played in one heart. If he were to philosophize upon the image, and connect all its parts in the order of time and the relation of cause, and then trace back the fleeting succession to infancy, he would have a perfect solution of those settled and fixed conditions of the sensibility, by which he is now marked. He would see how one thing has arisen from another; and how the countless exercises of his sensitive nature, linked in a long series of related events, have finally ended in his present style of feeling. There is a very curious history spread along the path of one's life, and lying between the susceptibility given and the modification acquired. All we want, is eyes to see it; and could we perfectly see it,