ed from Isaac and Abraham, and perhaps more distant and equally reputable progenitors, a princely patrimony-a source of wealth most favorable to personal dignity and most gratifying to family pride. He was the father of a numerous family of sons, all alive, and men of renown, already patriarchs, and the appointed heads and progenitors of the tribes of Israel. To crown all, now in his old age, his favorite son, whom he had long mourned as the victim of a frightful casualty, had just called him and his multitudinous household from a famine-stricken land, to make them sharers of his own honor and affluence, as the prime minister of a great king, and the actual ruler of the most wealthy and civilized nation on earth. It was of such a career that the venerable patriarch declared, "The days of the years of my pilgrimage have been few and evil." I think we should rather have expected there, in the presence of a heathen king, some humble acknowledgment of gratitude, some lofty ascription of praise for so much of Heaven's munificence, and for a life so full of days and of blessings. We find ourselves compelled to remember that Jacob lived under a lower dispensation than ours.

Any intelligent Christian would have given a wiser and more pious answer; but "the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he, than whom a greater had not risen among them that were born of women." It is a common error to think too highly of the light enjoyed under the dim revelation that preceded the Gospel, in comparison with the glorious manifestation under which it is our privilege to work out our salvation. We are thus led to expect too much of pious men under the old dispensation, and, taking them for our standard, to demand too little of ourselves.

For aught that appears to the contrary in the Bible, Jacob's answer to the King of Egypt was only such as a heathen or a mere worldling might have made. He gave expression to the sentiment of dissatisfaction and regret with which an old man is wont to look back upon the history of even an

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eventful and prosperous life. His rapid advancement to wealth and distinction, the uniform success of his far-reaching schemes, his thrifty management in his business transactions with Esau and Laban, and the signal triumph of his policy and his arms, contemplated from his actual position, were no longer able to awaken agreeable reminiscences. He thought rather of the trials of his early days; of his long, wellmerited self-banishment from the home of his childhood; of his solitary journey to the "land of the people of the East;" of his hard bondage in the service of Laban, when the drought consumed him by day and the frost by night, and sleep departed from his eyes;" of his long, deep, inconsolable mourning for Rachel, and Joseph, and Benjamin. Dark clouds had settled upon the landscape, now left far behind. The bright lights that illuminated the sky of his youth were dimmed or extinguished in the distance. The sweet flowers that beautified and perfumed the plains of Mesopotamia and the hills and valleys of Palestine had faded from his darkened vision. Such were the sad reminiscences and cheerless scenes amid which the aged patriarch retraced in retrospect the track of his long life, when he pronounced "the days of its years few and evil.” If his estimate of life was exaggerated, it was yet not unnatural. It was eminently human in the same breath to denounce life as evil, and yet to regret its brevity.

With only the imperfect light of nature for our guide, aided by all the revelations that preceded Him "who brought life and immortality to light," we should be compelled, I think, to admit this humbling, despairing view of life and our earthly condition to be essentially just. I am wholly unable to conceive how a mere philosopher, or any one who does not employ for the solution of this question the great argument of the Gospel, can relieve the subject of its melancholy aspects, or refuse to concur in the verdict which pronounces life essentially evil.

Let us interrogate the wisdom of the world on this momentous subject, and hear what responses it is able to give to mitigate our distaste and pacify our doubts and fears. How does it account for the manifold ills which flesh is heir to, even under the most favorable conditions of existence in this world? What consolation can it offer? What explanation can it give of the inexorable law which consigns us all to early death, heedless of our mortal reluctance, and as if in bitter mockery of the instinctive love of life which the great Lawgiver has himself planted deep in our nature? The case of an old man, who, like Jacob, has filled up a long life with usefulness and prosperity, is precisely that involved in the least difficulty; and yet I do not see how, independently of the teachings of the Gospel, we are to dispose of the doubts which even here crowd upon the mind. But how, on ordinary principles, shall we reconcile with the Divine mercy and justice the removal from their sphere of usefulness of men in the vigor of life-the fathers of helpless and dependent families-the patrons and instruments of those beneficent and ameliorating enterprises to which human society is accustomed to look for its well-being and its advancement in knowledge and virtue, no less than in material prosperity ? In the very strength and force of their manhood, in the very maturity and efficiency of their mental powers, at the acme of reputation and influence, do we see these pillars of the social fabric violently wrenched from their position, with a reckless disregard of human happiness not easily reconcilable with faith in an overruling Providence, but painfully suggestive rather of the reign, not of blind, but of malignant chance in human affairs.

Still more profound is the mystery that hangs over the dissolution of infancy and childhood, before one of the appreciable ends of life has been attained. Is it in mere wantonness, or for pastime and an ostentatious display of her productive energies, that nature so heedlessly and so wastefully

blasts in the bud, or in their first flower, a portion of the human family so truly prodigious? I know not what satisfactory answer a disbeliever in the Gospel can give to these, and a multitude of similar questions which the phenomena of daily life are ever forcing upon his attention. All the antiChristian theories of human life are reducible to two-individual happiness, and the perfection of the race. The first an

nounces the "chief end of man" to be, the promotion of his own happiness; the acquisition of knowledge, wealth, influence, and the enjoyment, perhaps the diffusion of them.

Of which of these pursuits and attainments are not death and its antecedents fatally obstructive? By the unchangeable laws of our being, youth and manhood must be spent in acquisition. The succeeding period, which the theory in question must regard the natural season of repose and fruition, is usually oppressed with infirmities which impair the powers of enjoyment, and render comparatively worthless resources accumulated with so much anxious toil, while the great destroyer soon arrives to dispel the poor illusions which the wisdom of the world has pronounced the "great end" of our being.

If old and middle age, unblessed by Christian hopes, has so much reason to be dissatisfied with the concomitants and results of even a prosperous life, what shall we say of those who die in infancy, childhood, and youth? of those who only live long enough to toil and suffer in quest of the appointed good, but not to obtain or enjoy it? Who shall say that they have not utterly failed of securing life's great object; and that life, with all its apparatus of faculties and means, and hopes and toils, has not been, to these victims of its injustice, discomfiture and cruel mockery? What anomalies and impertinences are these abortions of hope and toilsome endeavor, in a theory of life which has no future in which to solve its enigmas, adjust its contradictions, and compensate its sufferers !

But the wisdom of this world has another theory of life more comprehensive and specious, but beset with similar, and even greater difficulties. Nature, it teaches us, is little solicitous for the individual man, but provides bountifully for the race, of which all her laws and arrangements are designed to promote the well-being and the perfection. The individual man, indeed, suffers and dies; but man social, the body politic, the species, lives and is immortal. The aspirations of the human heart are to find their satisfaction in a participation of the aggregate happiness, and must learn stoicism or resignation in regard to the sorrows and sufferings of the units of which the great community is composed. This view of life forgets that cold, hunger, sickness, disappointment, destitution, oppression, befall men as individuals, not as a race, and that human society is only happy or the reverse, in the sensitive, intelligent individuals who compose it. But, waiving this fundamental difficulty, how does the theory in question serve to explain the dark phenomena of which we are in quest of the solution? How does the suffering of which the world is full-how does the death of infants, and children, and young men, contribute to the felicity or perfection of the human species, or of a community?

Upon this hypothesis, too, the shortness of life is inexplicable. The progress of society is chiefly retarded by the want of truly great men, fit to be leaders in its enterprises— of truly wise and good men, fit to be public teachers; to be the models and censors of public morals, leaders in great enterprises. Such men are proverbially rare. They rise scarcely two or three in a century; and while their advent is ever regarded as the harbinger of a golden age to the countries that may be honored by their birth, their early removal clothes nations in sackcloth. If, instead of being subjected to the common lot of mortals, these heaven-sent sages might be allowed the years of our antediluvian progenitors, what infinite benefits would they confer upon the world! Under