not the wisdom to avail ourselves of the promises of a long and happy life, teach us to live as becomes persons who are to die so soon. Lord, so teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."

This is a general idea of the end which our text has in view. But let us enter somewhat more deeply into this interesting subject. Let us make application of it to our own life, which bears a resemblance so striking to that which the children of Israel were doomed to pass in the wilderness. We are to enquire,

I. What is implied in numbering our days?

II. What are the conclusions which wisdom deduces from that enumeration?

I. In order to make a just estimate of our days, let us reckon, 1. Those days, or divisions of time, in which we feel neither good nor evil, neither joy nor grief, and in which we practice neither virtue nor vice, and which for this reason, I call days of nothingness; let us reckon these, and compare them with the days of reality. 2. Let us reckon the days of adversity, and compare them with the days of prosperity. 3. Let us reckon the days of languor and weariness, and compare them with the days of delight and pleasure. 4. Let us reckon the days which we have devoted to the world, and compare them with the days which we have devoted to religion. 5. Finally, let us calculate the amount of the whole, that we may discover how long the duration of a life is consisting of days of nothingness and of reality; of days of prosperity and of adversity; of days of pleasure and of languor;

days devoted to the world, and to the salvation of

the soul.

1. Let us reckon the days of nothingness, and compare them with the days of reality. I give the appellation of days of nothingness to all that portion of our life in which, as I said, we feel neither good nor evil, neither joy nor grief, in which we practice neither virtue nor vice, and which is a mere nothing with respect to us.

In this class must be ranked, all those hours which human infirmity lays us under the necessity of passing in sleep, and which run away with a third part of our life time, during which we are stretched in a species of tomb, and undergo, as it were, an anticipated death. Happy, at the same time, in being able, in a death not immediately followed by the judgment of God, to bury, in some measure, our troubles together with our life!

In this class must be farther ranked those seasons of inaction, and of distraction, in which all the faculties of our souls are suspended, during which we propose no kind of object to thought, during which we cease, in some sense, to be thinking beings; seasons which afford an objection, of no easy solution, to the opinion of those who maintain, that actual thought is essential to mind; and that from this very consideration, that it subsists, it must actually think.

In this class must be farther ranked, all those portions of time which are a burden to us; not because we are under the pressure of some calamity, for this will fall to be considered under another head, but because they form, if I may say so, a wall between us and certain events which we ardently wish to attain. Such as when we are in a state of uncertainty respecting certain questions, in which we feel ourselves deeply interested, but

which must remain undecided for some days, for some years. We could wish to suppress all those intervals of our existence, were God to put it in our power. Thus, a child wishes to attain, in a moment, the age of youth; the young man would hasten at once into the condition of the master of a family; and sometimes the father of a family would rush forward to the period when he should see the beloved objects of his affection settled in the world: and so of other cases.

In this class we may still rank certain seasons of preparation and design; such as the time which we spend in dressing and undressing; upon the road, and in other similar occupations, insipid and useless in themselves, and to which no importance attaches, but in so far as they are the means neeessary of attaining an object more interesting than themselves.

Reckon, if you can, what is the amount of this first class of your days; compare them with what we have called days of reality. Whoever will take the trouble to make such a calculation with any degree of exactness; must be constrained to deknowledge, that a man who says he has lived threescore years, has not lived twenty complete: because though he has, in truth, passed threescore years in the world, forty of these stole away in fittleness and inaction, and during this period he was, as if he had not been. This is the first enumeration, the enumeration of days of nothingness compared with days of reality.

2. Let us reckon the days of adversity, and compare them with the days of prosperity. To what a scanty measure would human life be réduced, were we to subtract from it those seasons of bitterness of soul, which God seems to have ap

pointed to us, rather to furnish an exercise to our patience, than to make us taste the pleasures of living.

What is life to a man, who feels himself condemned to live in a state of perpetual separation from persons who are dear to him? Collect in one and the same house, honors, riches, dignities; let the tables be loaded with a profusion of dainties; display the most magnificent furniture; let all that is exquisite in music be provided; let every human delight contribute its aid: all that is necessary to render all these delights insipid and disgusting, is the absence of one beloved object, say a darling child.

What is life to a man who has become infamous, to a man who is execrated by his fellow-creatures, who dares not appear in public, lest his ears should be stunned with the voice of malediction, thundering in every direction upon his head?

What is life to a man deprived of health; a man delivered over to the physicians; a man reduced to exist mechanically; who is nourished by merely studied aliments, who digests only according to the rules of art, who is able to support a dying life only by the application of remedies still more disgusting than the very maladies which they are called in to relieve?

What is life to a man arrived at the age of decrepitude, who feels his faculties decaying day by day, when he perceives himself becoming an object of pity and forbearance to all around him, or rather, becoming absolutely insupportable to every one; when he imagines he hears himself continually reproached with being an encumbrance on the face of the earth, and that he is occupying, too long, a place which he ought to resign, to one who might be more useful to society?

But this is not the worst of the case. Nothing more is necessary, in many cases, than a whim, a mere chimera, to disturb the happiest, and most splendid condition of human life.

Now, in which of our days shall we find those pure joys, which no infusion of bitterness has poisoned? In which of our days is it possible for us to behold the perfect harmony of glory in the state, of triumph in the church, of vigorous health, of prosperous fortune, of domestic peace, of mental tranquillity? In which of the days of our life did this concurrence of felicities permit us to consider ourselves as really happy?

Farther, if, in the ordinary current of our days, we had been deprived of only a few of the good things of life, while we possessed all the rest, the great number of those which we enjoyed, might minister consolation under the want of those which Providence had been pleased to withhold. But how often would an almost total destitution of good, and an accumulation of wo, render life insupportable, did not submission to the will of God, or rather, did not divine aid enable us to bear the ill of life?

Shall I have your permission, my brethren, to go into a detail of particulars on this head? For my own part, who have been in this world during a period not much longer than that which the children of Israel passed in the wilderness, I have scarcely heard any thing else spoken of, except disasters, desolations, destructive revolutions. Scarcely had I begun to know this church, into which I had been admitted in baptism, when I was doomed to be the melancholy spectator of the most calamitous events which can be presented to the eyes, or to the imagination of man. Have you forgotten them, my dear compatriots, my beloved companions in af