THIS declaration was a part of Jacob's answer to Pharaoh, when Joseph brought his father and his brethren, and set them before the king. And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, And Pharaoh said unto Jacob, how old art thou? And Jacob said unto Pharaoh, The days of the years of my pilgrimage are an hundred and thirty years. Few and evil have the days of the years of my life bern, and have not attained unto the days of the years of the life of my fathers. And Jacob blessed Pharaoh, and went out from before him. The scene is well calculated to excite our attention. The actors in it are a wise and powerful king, and a venerable and favoured servant of God. They meet with feelings of mutual admiration and good will. Pharaoh, rejoicing in the opportunity of doing honour to the parent of his favourite Joseph; Jacob, grateful for the kindness with which that favourite had been treated, and for the refuge now afforded to his father and his brethren. The grandeur of an absolute monarch is laid aside. Age and sanctity are treated with the deference that is due to them. The patriarch be. stows his advice and his blessing, and the king receives them both REMEMBRANCER, No. 48.

The whole forms one of those simple and touching pictures, which the inspired writers love to paint. It acquaints us with the primitive manners of those ancient times. It assures us that piety and virtue were esteemed even by the idolater. It enables us to ascertain the exact meaning of Jacob's well known words.

For the situation in which the patriarch stood, and the action by which his answer was accompanied, prove that he did not speak under the pressure of affliction, that he was not influenced by the querulous disposition of old age, that he did not utter the dictates of misanthropy or superstition. Joseph his son was yet alive, and he had come down to see him before he died. He had found him flourishing in power, reputation, and happiness, and exhibiting in his exalted station a bright pattern of filial piety. He had been honourably treated by the great king, and admitted into his presence with every token of regard. He felt and expressed a proper sense of these favours, and blessed the monarch by whose instrumentality they had been received. There was no room in his heart for disappointment, and his conduct did not savour of peevishness, but of satisfaction. His speech, therefore, is to be considered not as the view of life which is taken by the captive in his dun4 X

geon, or the mourner in his weeds, by the young who are cut off in the commencement of their career, or by the old, who survive their nearest and dearest connections, but as the mature and solemn judgment of wisdom, prosperity, and religion, as a declaration of the real length and nature of this life, a warning not to be engrossed by the days that are few and evil. Few, because whatever may be their extent, they can never satisfy that appetite for life, that love and that hope of a permanent existence, which is natural to man. Evil, because they are chequered with faults and sufferings, because they are never exempted from injury and calamities, because they are often pro tracted amidst want and misery, and always exposed to the apprehension of danger.

This is an adequate summary and explanation of the patriarch's words, and in making them the subject of the present discourse, I shall compress my remarks upon the first head within a very short compass. If you have yet to learn that your days are few, you are ignorant not merely of the lessons of Scripture, but of the first and plainest lessons of common sense. The shortness, the uncertainty of human life is notorious, proverbial, self-evident. One day telleth another, and one year certifieth another, that in the morning man is green as the grass, and in the evening he is cut down, dried up, and withered. His days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle. says to corruption, thou art my father; and to the worm, thou art my mother and my sister. And if there be a season in which these truths are incontestible, that season is present to us now. Another year is about to be added to those that cannot return. Another stage in the great journey of life has been reached, and will soon be passed. Another winter has arrived with clouds and darkness, and we look forward to another spring of hope

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and promise, to another pleasant summer, and another fruitful autumn. While the sun and the seasons are thus continually changing, is man permanent and stable? Is he to be found to-morrow where he is found to-day-fixed, immoveable, and enduring? Or has the Church rightly instructed us to say, "Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of vanity. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay." Which of these is an accurate description of our state? Whether your life has been protracted, like Jacob's, to extreme old age, or whether you are in the full strength and confidence of manhood, or whether you are escaping from the fetters of weakness and childhood, in every imaginable case you must acknowledge that your days are few, and that there is no pretence and no excuse for misem. ploying them. Few as they are they are not all your own. Infancy and youth are the mere seasons of preparation; most important, most invaluable; but still not that which the irreligious and the worldly term life. And if they are followed by a brief space of gratification and self-indulgence, that space is succeeded but too certainly and too quickly by the complicated diseases of old age.

Without exaggerating the description with which it is so important to become acquainted, look to the fact. Let those who live as if this world were an abiding city, simply make a calculation of the years which they may expect to pass here. Let them, if they please, put all accidents and casualties out of the account. Let them take it for granted that they shall live to the full age of man.

And even then how short is the season which they can pass in sin! how few are the days which they can dedicate to worldly joy! In childhood man is necessarily subject to the will and direction of others.

His declining years are beset by pain and weakness; and all that can in any sense be called his own, is a space which is literally but a span long, and even that may be annihilated in an instant. These truths may be forgotten, but they can neither be denied nor doubted. They are impressed upon our minds by the circumstances of our present situation. The lamps of heaven, that have been set for signs and seasons, are about to accomplish their annual revolution. They warn us that we likewise have an appointed course, and that its completion is not far off. Shall we be deaf to their voices and live on in carelessness, or shall we endeavour so to pass through things temporal, that finally we lose not the things eternal? To this plain question each of you should be prepared to make a distinct answer, and it is probable that your answer will be influenced by the second division of my subject, by remembering that life is not more happy than it is lasting, and that your days are evil as well as few.

It is not my intention to deny the existence of much comfort and of many blessings upon earth. Life is the gift of the Father of mercies, and we are bound to thank him for our creation and preservation. But the question is, ought we to be engrossed by present enjoyments and gratifications, and to lose sight of better and more enduring bliss? The negative answer which religion directs us to return, is strengthened by reflecting upon the real nature of our present state, and that state is admirably described by the wise Son of Sirach. Great travail is prepared for every man, and an heavy yoke is upon the sons of Adam, from the day that they go out of their mother's womb, till the day that they return to the mother of all things. Their imagination of things to come, and the day of death trouble their thoughts, and cause fear of heart. From him that sitteth on a throne

of glory unto him that is humbled in earth and ashes, from him that weareth purple and a crown, unto him that is clothed with a linen frock.-All things are full of la. bour; man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear with hearing. So said King Solomon in the days of his most perfect wisdom, when he had made trial of every thing under the sun. So said and so felt the upright and the patient Job, when his prosperity was turned into sorrow, and his mirth into sickness. His grief was embittered by the happiness from which he had fallen, and his suffering would have been less acute if he could have blotted out the recollection of his joy. O that I were as in months past; when the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were about me! The result of so much happiness, was an undue feeling of security. I said I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days as the sand. It was in order to correct this presumptuous expectation, that God suffered Job to be tempted. And when the Lord answered his servant out of the whirlwind, the pur. port of his sublime discourse, was to prove that we ought to submit to the calamities which may be inflicted upon us, and ought not to deny or question the wisdom of the Almighty. God shewed that all his works were the works of goodness and strength. And, therefore, if he thinks fit to bring the righteous into trouble, there is every reason to conclude that such an appointment is for the best. It humbles the confidence of the human heart. It awakens the torpid, and restrains the giddy. It recalls our thoughts to the Ruler and Preserver of the world, and keeps up a perpetual sense of our dependence upon his will. Therefore God has ordained, that our days shall be evil as well as few, and so accurately and universally is his plan performed, that each of us may join in the decla

ration of Jacob, and may trace up our misfortunes to that plentiful source which sprinkled his life with tears.

His first and longest and most painful sufferings were produced by vice and frailty. He was guilty of a gross and aggravated falsehood, and the result was, that he fled from the wrath of his injured brother, renounced the rich inheritance which he had sinned to secure, passed over Jordan with no other possession than his staff, and endured twenty years of severe labour and pain, under the orders of a cruel master. Thus, said he, I was, in the day the drought consumed me, and the frost by night, and my sleep departed from mine eyes. These privations and calamities were the effects of his own wickedness, and other misfortunes were accumulated upon him by the wickedness of his fellow-creatures. His children afflicted him by their folly and misconduct. Simeon and Levi troubled him by their savage slaughter of the Shechemites. And the still more inexcu. sable treatment of Joseph by his brethren, threw a gloom over a considerable portion of their father's days, and nearly brought down his gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. Another cause of the evil which he declared himself to have experienced, is to be found in the scarcity with which God af flicted Egypt and Canaan. The famine was sore in the land, and he was forced to send his sons on a long and dangerous journey, to go and buy a little food in Egypt, that they might live and not die, he and they and their little ones.

Such were the three principal sources of that uneasiness and trou. ble, which made the days of Jacob evil: his own and his fellow-creatures' faults, and the calamities which nature brings upon us all. And have these sources failed? Or are they still as productive as in the days of old, still wearying our spirits, and breaking our re

pose, still preventing our enjoyment of any unmixed good, and warning us to seek a better country, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest? The case of the notoriously wicked is not at present under consideration; though every thing that we say might be applied with greater force to them. But confining our attention to such as, in the main, are devout and virtuous, and to such portion of the devout and virtuous as may be said to enjoy a prosperous life, are not they perpetually disturbed by their own and others' faults, and by the ordinary occurrences of the world? Tempted by some agreeable prospect, they forget the pure and perfect law, deviate, like Jacob, from the line of truth and duty, and involve themselves in all the danger, trepidation, and disgrace, to which such actions lead. How continually do we hear of the sins of a man's youth, perhaps even his forsaken and repented sins, rising up against him when his hairs are gray, and embittering the last hours of his life! How perpetually are we doomed to suffer acute and lasting pain from the behaviour of our nearest connections. Some Laban defrauds us by changing our wages ten times, and leaving us at last in penury. Some profane and angry Esau eudangers our lives by his violence, and our peace by his threats. Children, that should unite to become the support and honour of your declining years, hate and envy each other, until their fury knows no limit, and the most promising is undone and lost.

Lastly, the inevitable decrees of Providence will frequently afflict us in as sensible a manner. The hardly earned, and the best beloved are taken away from us, as Rachel was taken away from Jacob. Poverty and hunger torment and overwhelm us, and the famine is sore in the land. Every expedient is resorted to for diminishing our distress, and

they serve but to plunge us deeper in ruin. We exclaim with the patriarch, in the most pathetic of his lamentations, Joseph is not, and Simeon is not, and ye will take Benjamin away. All these things are against me. They were against the venerable old man, and rendered his few days evil. They are also in different proportions against every one of you, and they make life so unsatisfactory, so delusive, so painful, that the grossest folly of which we are guilty in our temporal affairs, is prudence and foresight, and wisdom and discretion, when compared with that perverseness which turns the face from God, and makes us act as if here only we had hope. There is nothing in these calamities which God cannot or will not enable us to endure. All the days of our appointed time are we bound to wait, until our change cometh. But there is enough to wean us from the world. There is enough to make us look forward to a happier state; there is enough to satisfy us that our days are evil, and that the longest and fullest enjoyment of them which is attained by man, is a poor and paltry object of ambition, unworthy of a rational being, unable to gratify the longing of an immortal soul.

If the words and the experience of Jacob induce you to reflect upon this fact, survey it in its whole extent and consequences; and then the example of the patriarch will enable you to feel that faith and trust in God is the remedy for the evil with which your days are full. In all the afflictions of the great Father of the Israelites, God was his stay. As he fled from the provoked and cruel Esau, God shewed him the mystical ladder which reached from earth to heaven, and promised to be with him and keep him whithersoever he went. And Jacob vowed a vow and said, If God will be with me and keep me, so that I come again unto my father's house in peace, then shall the

Lord be my God. This was a promise made in sorrow, and in the hour of gladness it was not forgotten. While he was in servitude with Laban he trusted in the God of Bethel, and all that God had promised was performed. When he was about to encounter Esau, and was afraid of his anger and strength, he prayed earnestly and humbly to God. I am not worthy of the least of all the mercies, and all the truth, which thou hast shewed unto thy servant, for with my staff I passed over this Jordan, and now I am become two bands. When an angel met him aud wrestled with him, he refused to let him go, until he prevailed and obtained the blessing. And when his dangers and fears were over, and he returned to Bethel in peace, he made there an altar unto the God that answered him in the day of his distress, and was with him in the way which he went. Lastly, when the time drew near that Israel must die, his first request to his beloved Joseph was, bury me not in Egypt, but I will lie with my fathers in their buryingplace. God Almighty appeared unto me at Luz in the land of Canaan, and blessed me, and said unto me, Behold I will make thee fruitful and multiply thee, and make of thee a great multitude of people; and will give this land to thy seed after thee for an everlasting possession. Here was humble trust and faith, in a tried and powerful defender. Fear, toil, danger, famine, had all been endured and escaped by the assistance of the Lord. With the same never-failing aid, death was cheerfully undergone, and the promises of God became a plentiful source of consolation. The whole is worthy of our strictest imitation, and there can be no better opportunity of exhorting you to observe it, than the conclusion of a discourse, in which we have endeavoured to prove that few and evil are your days.

The ladder that Jacob saw indis