Thadeu

V. . .7
other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die ; others float up and down two or
three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others : and they that live longest open the face
of the waters, are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud
sink into the flat level of dead humanity.
All the succession of tiuie, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of Light and Darkness, the thousand
thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every man, and to every creature, doth preach •
our funeral sermon ; and calls us to look and see how Time ever digs the grave where we must lay our sins
or our sorrows ; and our mortal bodies moulder away and again become in atoms a portion of the great
material world . Every revolution which the earth makes around the sun, divides between life and death ; and
death possesses both those portions by the next morrow ; and we are dead to all those months which we have
already lived, and we shall never live them over again ; and still God makes little periods of our age .
Every day's necessity calls for a reparation of that portion which death fed on all night, when we lay in
his lap, and slept in his outer chambers . While we think a thought, we die ; and the clock strikes, and
reckons on our portion of eternity . We form our words with the breath of our nostrils : • we have the less to
live upon for every word we speak .
Death reigns in all the portions of our time . The autumn with its fruits provides disorders for us ; and
the winter's cold turns them into sharp diseases ; and the spring brings flowers to strew our hearse ; and the
summer gives green turf and brambles to bind upon our graves . Fevers and surfeit, cold and agues, are the
four quarters of the year, and all minister to death ; and you can go no whither, but you tread upon a dead
man's bones .
Death meets us everywhere ; and is procured by every instrument, and in all chances, and enters in at
many doors ; by violence and secret influence, by a licit or a cold, by the sharp tooth of an unregarded serpent,
the shying of an unruly horse at the sudden flutter of a garment ; by stumbling at a loose stone lying in the
_way, by the scratch of an envenomed lancet, by a little spark of fire upon a swift boat that of a dark night
descends a deep broad river ; all are the instruments of death, and overtake us with a sudden fate . And all
this is the law and constitution of Nature, the unalterable event of Providence, and the decree of Heaven .
The chains that confine us to this condition are strong as Destiny, and immutable as the eternal laws of God .
Death is the portion of every man and every woman ; the heritage of worms and serpents, of rottenness
and cold dishonour. This day is mine and yours ; but we know not what shall be on the morrow ; and every
morning creeps out of a dark cloud, leaving behind it an ignorance and silence deep as midnight, and
undiscerned as are the phantasms that make an infant smile ; so that we cannot discern what comes
hereafter .
Even our joys are troublesome ; and the fear of losing them takes away the present pleasure. They are
brief and fleeting as the remembrance of a traveller that stayeth but a night . They arise from vanity, and
they dwell upon ice, and they converse with the wind, and they have the wings of a bird, and are serious but
as the resolutions of a child, and end in vanity and forgetfulness . Alan is ever restless and uneasy. He
dwells upon the waters, and leans upon thorns, and lays his head upon a sharp stone .
The •sadnesses of life help to sweeten the bitter cup of death . For let our life be never so long, if our
strength were great as that of the Titans, and our sinews strong as the cordage at the foot of - an oak, yet still
the period shall be, that all this shall end in death, and the people shall talk of as awhile, good or bad, accord .
ing as •we deserve or as they please ; and once it shall come to pass, that concerning every one of us, it shall
be told in the neighbourhood that we are dead .
Such, my Brethren, are the uncertainty and vanity of Life . And if we could, from one of the battlements
o£ Heaven espy how many men and women at this moment lie fainting and dying for want of broad ; how
many young men are hewn down by the sword of war ; how many poor orphans are now weeping over the
graves of their fathers, by whose life they were enabled to eat ; if we could but hear how many mariners and
passengers are at this moment in a storm, and shriek out because their keel dashes against a rock, or their
foundering vessel far out at sea shudders as she sinks down into the ocean ; how many people there are that
weep with want, or are mad with oppression, or are desperate by too quick a sense of a constant infelicity ;
we should rejoice to be beyond the noise and participation of so many evils .