ossible, can help seeing them.
First a fixed order that nothing can change and that proclaims one Lord,
one will, one dominion, one plan. The seasons come in regular
succession. Every man living knows when the summer is gone that winter
is coming. That will not and cannot be changed. Were the whole world to
conspire in one effort that spring should come next it would be
unavailing. The winter is coming. But with this fixed order is
established perpetual change, variety, mutability, so that although we
know the season that is coming we know not what kind of a season it shall
be, and all our temporal interests hang upon that question. When the
merchant has got his stock, when the man of pleasure has fixed for his
party, when the General has planned his campaign, when the Admiral has
laid down the arrangements for the battle, when the grand politician has
perfected the plot for a new crisis of the world, what must they do? Not
look to what the earth but what the heaven will do. Everything depends
upon that. They cannot decide the market price even of hard sovereigns,
they cannot foretell the value of their wheat, they cannot determine the
life and health of their soldiers or the hours and effect of movements
independent of that one consideration, what will the heavens do? Three
days rain will change a whole campaign or a harvest. By the arrangement
of the seasons we are constantly kept at the door of Divine mercy,
begging "Give us this day our daily bread." That eternal voice preaching
through all our temporal interests is to us the solemn, never-ceasing
protest against worldliness, earthliness, vanity, living for time, living
for the body; and, above all, against every impure or ungodly method of
attempting to secure our temporal aims.

"For days" as well as for seasons. The season passes slowly, but the
day--oh what a solemn appointment is that! When the Lord made the sun to
rule the day and the moon to rule the night it would have been very easy
for Him to make two suns so that we should bask in perpetual daylight.
But no, it was his will that our life should be cut into very short
lengths and that by a mark so deep, broad, black, that the dullest man
could not escape its impression. The dark gulf that lies between the
dead day and the day unborn is the ever recurring remembrancer--Thy days
are numbered; thy life is held under law; thy time is a measured current
of golden sands. Every particle as it come