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are willing to forget it, experience informs us. If we look into the gay or the busy world, we see every eye directed towards pleasure or advantage, and every hour filled with expectation, or occupied by employment; and day passed after day in the enjoyment of success, or the vexation of disappointment.

Nor is it true only of men who are engaged in enterprises of hazard, which restrain the faculties to the utmost, and keep attention always upon the stretch. Religion is not only neglected by the projector and adventurer, by men who suspend their happiness on the slender thread of artifice, or stand tottering upon the point of chance. For, if we visit the most cool and regular parts of the community; if we turn our eye to the farm or to the shop, where one year glides uniformly after another, and nothing new or important is either expected or dreaded; yet still the same indifference about eternity will be found. There is no interest so small, nor engagement so slight, but that, if it be followed and expanded, it may be sufficient to keep religion out of the thoughts. Many men may be observed, not agitated by very violent passions, nor overborne by any powerful habits, nor depraved by any great degrees of wickedness; men who are honest dealers, faithful friends, and inoffensive neighbours; who yet have no vital principle of religion; who live wholly without self-examination, and indulge any desire that happens to arise, with very little resistance or compunction; who hardly know what it is to combat a temptation or to repent of a fault; but go on, neither self-approved nor self

condemned; not endeavouring after any excellence, nor reforming any vicious practice or irregular desire. They have no care of futurity, neither is God in all their thoughts; they direct none of their actions to his glory; they do nothing with the hope of pleasing; they avoid nothing for the fear of offending him. Those men want not much of being religious; they have nothing more than casual views to reform; and, from being peaceable and temperate heathens, might, if they would once awaken to their eternal interest, become pious and exemplary Christians. But let them not be deceived; they cannot suppose that God will accept him who never wished to be accepted by him, or made his will the rule of action.

Others there are, who, without attending to the written revelation of God's will, form to themselves a scheme of conduct in which vice is mingled with virtue, and who cover from themselves, and hope to cover from God, the indulgence of some criminal desire or the continuance of some vicious habit, by a few splendid instances of public spirit, or some few effusions of occasional bounty: but to these men it may, with emphatical propriety, be urged, that "God is not mocked;" he will not be worshiped nor obeyed but according to his own laws.

The mode of self-deception which prevails most in the world, and by which the greatest number of souls is at last betrayed to destruction, is the art which we are all too apt to practise, of putting far from us the evil day, of setting the hour

of death, and the day of account, at a great dis

tance.

That death is certain, every one knows; nor is it less known, that life is destroyed, at all ages, by a thousand causes; that the strong and the vigorous are liable to diseases, and that caution and temperance afford no security against the final stroke. Yet, as the thought of dissolution is dreadful, we do not willingly admit it; the desire of life is connected with animation; every living being shrinks from his destruction: to wish, and to hope, are never far asunder; as we wish for long life, we hope that our wishes will be granted; and what we hope, we either believe, or do not examine. So tenaciously does our credulity lay hold of life, that it is rare to find any man so old as not to expect an addition to his years; or so far wasted and enfeebled with disease as not to flatter himself with hopes of recovery.

To those who procrastinate amendment in hopes of better opportunities in future time, it is too often vainly urged by the preacher, and vainly suggested by a thousand examples, that the hour of death is uncertain. This, which ought to be the cause of their terror, is the ground of their hope; that, as death is uncertain, it may be distant. This uncertainty is, in effect, the great support of the whole system of life. The man who died yesterday had purchased an estate, to which he intended some time to retire; or built a house, which he was hereafter to inhabit; and planted gardens and groves, that, in a certain number of years, were to supply delicacies to his

feasts, and shades to his meditations. He is snatched away, and has left his designs and his labours to others.

As men please themselves with felicities to be enjoyed in the days of leisure and retreat; so, among these felicities, it is not uncommon to design a reformation of life, and a course of piety. Among the more enlightened and judicious part of mankind, there are many who live in a continual disapprobation of their own conduct, who know, that they do every day what they ought to leave undone, and every day leave undone what they ought to do; and who therefore consider themselves as living under the divine displeasure, in a state in which it would be very dangerous to die. Such men answer the reproaches of conscience with sincerity and intention of performance, but which they consider as debts to be discharged at some remote time. They neither sin with stupid negligence, nor with impious defiance of the divine laws; they fear the punishments denounced against sin, but pacify their anxiety with possibilities of repentance, and with a plan of life to be led according to the strict precepts of religion, and to be closed at last by a death softened by holy consolations. Projects of future piety are perhaps not less common than of future pleasure, and are, as there is reason to fear, not less commonly interrupted; with this dreadful difference, that he who misses his intended pleasure, escapes a disappointment; but he who is cut off before the season of repentance, is exposed to the vengeance of an angry God.

JOHNSON.

REFLECTIONS

ON EVENING AND ON AUTUMN.

THERE is an eventide in the day,—an hour when the sun retires, and the shadows fall, and when nature assumes the appearance of soberness and silence. It is an hour from which every where the thoughtless fly, as peopled only in their imagination with images of gloom;-it is the hour, on the other hand, which, in every age, the wise have loved, as bringing with it sentiments and affections more valuable than all the splendours of the day.

Its first impression is to still all the turbulence of thought or passion which the day may have brought forth. We follow, with our eye, the descending sun,-we listen to the decaying sounds of labour and of toil,-and, when all the fields are silent around us, we feel a kindred stillness to breathe upon our souls, and to calm them from the agitations of society. From this first impression, there is a second which naturally follows it;-in the day we are with living men,-in the evening we begin to live with nature,-we see the world withdrawn from us,-the shades of night darken over the habitations of men, and we feel ourselves alone. It is an hour fitted, as it would seem, by Him who made us, to still, but with gentle hand, the throb of every unruly passion, and the ardour of every impure desire; and, while it veils for a time the world that misleads us, to awaken in our hearts those legitimate

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