contemplating that average measure of time, and in considering its parts and nature. Such a practice will keep us always instructed in their true value; it will prevent us, on the one hand, from under-rating the parts with respect to the whole measure; and from over-rating that whole measure, with respect to the infinite measure of existence which is to succeed. For, since SEVENTY YEARS, though amply sufficient for the end designed, supplies nothing for intentional and deliberate waste, we must economize, and wisely husband, the particles of time which compose them. We must discreetly watch over those smaller parts of life; not as being of importance in themselves, but because they constitute the whole of the term assigned us, for fixing the quality of the life which shall follow. Again, since those SEVENTY YEARS Conduct us immediately into another stage of existence, which has no change or termination, we must be careful not to attach to the former, an opinion of importance, which belongs only to the latter. For," the oldest

"men," says the experience of the late Archdeacon Paley, "when they look back "on their past life, see it in a very narrow 66 compass. It appears no more than a "small interval cut out of eternal duration, "both before and after it: when compared "with that duration, as nothing*."

We are not however to imagine, that seventy years is a quantity of time, necessarily requisite for a moral agent to acquire a secure tendency towards his perfection, supposing the inclination of his will to be briginally, and always, right and sure; for then a shorter period might have sufficed: but it is a measure, largely and liberally allotted by God, with allowance for much delay and aberration, provided the tendency of the agent be, at length, decidedly and steadily determined, towards the rule of his perfection.

This being the case, it becomes our highest, and most manifest interest, to know, and to observe well, our actual station

Sermon xxxi. p. 463.

C

within the average measure of life; to consider the true relation which our actual station bears to the averaged end; to impress our minds with a conviction of the uncertainty of our ever reaching that end; and, to ascertain the degree of habit, which we have already acquired, of conforming our wills to the governing will: which is the sole end for which we are placed in this part of the universe, and indeed the only reason why we were created at all.

Awakened to such a contemplation as this, the mind at once views TIME, under all its relations; by the united action of its reflection, its memory, and its forethought. By these, it dwells upon the consideration of time present, time past, and time future. It sees them in all their bearings; it compares the past, and applies the rule of the comparison to the future; and it at length becomes practically sensible of the extreme value of those fleeting particles, which we constantly denominate now, and which pass away continually, like the sands in the hour-glass, until all are exhausted.

These are, doubtless, great and awful truths; and the mind, once brought to recognise them, cannot fail to draw all the inferences, the principal of which have been here sketched out. But it is a fact not to be disputed, humiliating as the acknowledgment of it may be; (the author, for one, has often experienced it in himself;) that the noblest practical truths, and the most powerful demonstrations in morals and religion, however laboriously and triumphantly established, lie too commonly neglected, and unapplied, upon the page which gave them light: the inertness of our common nature, like the indolence of a relaxed or exhausted stomach, requiring to be roused, from time to time, by some pungency of novelty; and refusing to take the benefit of the most nutritious aliment, unless excited by something new and artificial in the vehicle or savour. Thus it is, that parable and allegory have, in all ages, been found capable of stirring the mind, even when the powers of eloquence and demonstration have failed of all their effects.

It is not, that we stand in need of any instruction, to teach us the value of time, and the importance of balancing our minds and our years. Of that, we have an ample store; both in the writings of wise and ingenious heathens, and in those of enlightened and faithful Christians. The two little tracts, by two heathen philosophers'; that upon Old Age, by Cicero, and that on the Shortness of Life, by Seneca; abound with truths, both of statement and argument, upon that subject, which are sufficient to make most Christians blush. And the numberless treatises of our own Christian philosophers, hold out to us, at every page, truths of authority and power, sufficient to startle every Christian, upon the same momentous article: the CORRESPONDENCE, which ought invariably to be maintained between our THOUGHTS and our YEARS, in our progress through life.

But, although we are in no want of instruction for that end, we are plainly in want of something, to excite and encourage us to use that instruction; something, which may