LECTURE I.

PSALM, LVI. 12.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

THE sacred penman-the sacred poets, have lavishly poured forth images, to express the uncontinuing character of human life. It is bounded as a spanfugacious as a shadow, unsubstantial as a vapour, blooming and fading like a flower that cometh up, and is straightway cut down and withered. Thus creation on every side furnishes emblems of mortality—and man, the lord of creation, is the grand prototype, to which all these emblems refer. His hopes and his joys, his fears and his sorrows, his studies, his enterprises, his occupations, are all but preludes and preparatives for a dread,

inevitable catastrophe.

winds up

ed scene.

Death finally

the tale, and closes the chequer

An issue, thus certain, would, even were it distant, be awful:-but it is nigh at hand; it is ever impending. In the life of every individual, each minute may be the last sand-grain :—each passing incident the scythe-stroke of dissolution.*

To maintain a due impression and a wholesome alarm, as to the certainty and proximity of death; instances of it are continually occurring. Death's shafts fly thick:-his victims are every instant falling on this globe; which is one vast burying ground and weekly-almost daily, they fall in every neighbourhood. The angel of destruction knocks at every door, his sword ever reeking with life; and as with

* Death distant! No, alas! he's ever near us,
And shakes the dart at us in all our actings;
He lurks within our cup when we're in health;
Sits by our sick-bed; mocks our medicines;
We cannot walk, or sit, or sleep, or travel,
But Death is by, to seize us when he lists.

Egypt of old, miraculously, in a single night-so with us, in the course of nature, within a few years, there is not a house in which he leaves not one dead. To strike the greater terror, he observes no order in his seizures. He lifts the latch of the cottage, and breaks through the guards of the palace. The high and the low are alternately and promiscuously his prey nor can piety herself, though smiling at his malice, charm him into a passover of her habitation.* And as with every condition, so he deals with every age. Walking abroad in the earth, he now smites the lisping infant, with eyes just opened on the world-now arrests the youth, with high-beating heart, and with pulses keenly alive to pleasure,—now levels with the ground, the full-grown man, while confiding and exulting in his strength; and now, though rarely, suffers

*

nec petas moram

Rugis, et intanti senecla
Offeret, indemitæque morti.

HOR.

the lamp of life to be extinguished through the mere exhaustion of the oil.

Death-thus certain, near, and continually occurring, is furthermore universal. Learning and ignorance, power and weakness, idleness and exertion, gaiety and seriousness, health and sickness, virtue and vice, must all after a few years terminate in dissolution. There is not one of us here present but is destined to experience his death-struggle;-not one but must sooner or later close his eyes on this visible, diurnal scene. Sometimes the thread of life is snapt hastily asunder, and sometimes it gradually unwinds itself. Sometimes the work of death proceeds in masses, and by thousands. The earthquake and the conflagration; the hurricane and the tempest; the famine and the pestilence; the conflict of fleets or of armies, are the mighty weapons of Omnipotence; when for purposes of wisdom or of vengeance, it would disarrange its own general laws, and outstrip the course of nature, in depopulating

the multitudes of mankind. But the usual march of destruction is slow, silent, piecemeal; though not less unerringly certain: till almost imperceptibly a generation is swept away from the earth. Thus, whether singly, or in aggregate files, it is appointed unto all men once to die. For I know that thou wilt bring me to death and to the house appointed for ALL LIVING. To pronounce death universal, is to call it unavoidable. Our days are threescore years and ten-some linger upon earth beyond that term; but there is no medical skill, no peculiar privilege, which can stay the advance of decrepitude, or save from the inexorable destroyer.

It might be imagined, that the certainty, the nearness, the continual occurrence, the universality, the unavoidableness of Death would conspire to render it a subject of frequent and familiar meditation. Yet strange to tell, these truths, through their notoriety and commonness (the very circumstances which