nd trodden under
foot. The most of us, my brethren, are fast approaching, or have already
passed the meridian of life; our sun is setting in the West; and oh! how
much more swift is the passage of our declining years than when we
started upon the journey, and believed--as the young are too apt to
believe--that the roseate hues of the rising sun of our existence were
always to be continued. When we look back upon the happy days of our
childhood, when the dawning intellect first began to exercise its powers
of thought, it seems as but yesterday, and that, by a simple effort of
the will, we could put aside our manhood, and seek again the loving
caresses of a mother, or be happy in the possession of a bauble; and
could we now realize the idea that our last hour had come, our whole
earthly life would seem but as the space of time from yesterday until
today. Centuries upon centuries have rolled away behind us; before us
stretches out an eternity of years to come; and on the narrow boundary
between the past and the present flickers the puny taper we term our
life. When we came into the world, we knew naught of what had been
before us; but, as we grew up to manhood, we learned of the past; we saw
the flowers bloom as they had bloomed for centuries; we beheld the orbs
of day and night pursuing their endless course among the stars, as they
had pursued it from the birth of light; we learned what men had thought,
and said, and done, from the beginning of the world to our day; but only
through the eye of faith can we behold what is to come hereafter, and
only through a firm reliance upon the Divine promises can we satisfy the
yearnings of an immortal soul. The cradle speaks to us of
remembrance--the coffin, of hope, of a blessed trust in a never-ending
existence beyond the gloomy portals of the tomb.

Let these reflections convince us how vain are all the wranglings and
bitterness engendered by the collisions of the world; how little in
dignity above the puny wranglings of ants over a morsel of food, or for
the possession of a square inch of soil.

What shall survive us? Not, let us hope, the petty strifes and
bickerings, the jealousies and heart-burnings, the small triumphs and
mean advantages we have gained, but rather the noble thoughts, the words
of truth, the works of mercy and justice, that ennoble and light up the
existence of every honest man, however humble, and live for good when
his body, like this remnant of mortality,