Southern Christian Advocate

AWAKENING CONSIDERATIONS.

Reader! remember how short and uncertain thy being in the world is; our life is but a vapor that soon appeareth and disappeareth, dispersed as soon as raised, James iv. 14. It is a little spot of time between two eternities. One of the ancients doubted whether he should call it a dying life or a living death. And if our life, which is a breathing death, had been less than a vapor, it had been nothing at all. The Psalmist describes man as grass, "In the morning it flourisheth—in the evening it is cut down and withereth;" Psa. xc. Man continueth but a short time, his life is but a span long, like Jonah's gourd, which came up in a night and perished in a night. The first steps man sets upon the stage of this world, he is going out of the world. Naturalists speak of a fly which they call ephemeron, a creature of one day; it cometh forth in the morning, and is very active about noon, but when the sun declineth it declineth also, and sets with the sun. Man is an ephemeron, a creature of one day. The Ancient of Days sets up one glass in heaven; there it is running, and we see not how it hastens to an end. Think, O devout soul, of the swiftness of thy time here below, how fast it flies; the line and lease of life will quickly be out. It is but a point of time we live, for while we but turn, immortality is present. This present life is but the place of our inn and sepulchre; the beginning of this life is but the approach to death. We are carried every moment of time to the end of time. Human life may be compared to one sailing on the waters; he who sails, whether he stand or sit, watch or walk, is carried nearer the port. May we not say, with old Jacob, "Few and evil have the days of the years of my life been," in which we have this account cast up? "Life," said one, "resembles a rose, which if we view in its growth, the cold nips it, the heat withers it, the wind shakes it, and be it never so fair it withers." Life, says another, is a counterfeit; what if the colors be fair, and the resemblance near, the shadow of death, and the curtains of the grave will darken all. O, sleepy and secure sinner, think of the uncertainty of death, the stranger of thy soul, the nearness and length of eternity, and the necessity of preparing in a moment of time for an eternal state. Die and leave the world we must—in the grave there is no work—after death the judgment, Heb. ix. 27. Sin poisons the arrow in the quiver of the king of terrors, and puts the scythe into the hands of death to cut us down. Methinks sin speaks to the several generations of man whom death has conquered, as David did to the priest who had escaped Saul's bloody sword: "I have been the occasion of all this." Sin and death are coupled together, Rom. viii. 2.—John Fox, Door of Heaven opened, A. D. 1796.