As

a road can tell how long the miles appear, how heavily the time hangs; how weary become the feet! you trudge onward, seeing nothing to give you assurance that you are nearing the goal, your heart sinks for want of hope. You do not know how far you have come; you cannot guess how far you have yet to go. Oh! for a stone or post to tell you that you have accomplished some definite portion of your journey, if it be only one single mile; for then you know the extent of your toil. At such landmarks you sit you down, as on an oasis, and bathe your way worn feet, and dry your tears, and rise refreshed and strengthened for the next stage on your journey. How infinite is the mercy of Heaven in adapting times and seasons to man's estate and condition! Let us suppose a sudden change, and that the earth occupied two years in revolving round the sun -that the four seasons were doubled in length. How the tedium of opening spring would provoke us! how the glory of summer would pall upon us! how the lingering promise of autumn would make the heart sick! and how terrible would be the dread of the coming winter! But to realize this more forcibly, let us imagine a day of forty-eight hours-twenty-four hours of day, and the same number of night. As it is, many of us talk of killing Time. But in such a case, would not all mankind be in league to put an end to him once and for ever? So intolerable does the bare idea of such an arrangement appear, that the order of things in the inhabited regions near the poles may almost be regarded as a defect in the Great Scheme. These regions are apt to give us the idea of outhouses attached to the Great Building which were never intended to be inhabited except by reindeer and bears. Tell a fashionable cockney of a place where they never draw down the blinds and light the lamps for five months and he will faint. Perhaps the seven months when the blinds are permanently drawn down, and the lamps are always burning, would suit him better; but he would get tired even of that. The fool's

paradise of eternal night-revels would be a pandemonium. Nature has set us an example in the ordering of seasons, and the marking of time, which we have followed in our own small way by instituting minor subdivisions. It may be said, God made years and days, and man made hours and minutes and seconds. It is well that the plan has been thus artificially extended, for we stand in need of the most frequent reminders of the flight of time. Without these bells of warning, clashing for ever around us, the sands of life would steal away like a thief, robbing us of many wholesome seasons of thought and sober reflection. But we take small note of these minor warnings. Carpe diem is a maxim little heeded. A miserly maxim. As if a day were of any account! A youth with many years in store for him throws away a day as a rich man throws away a guinea. There are plenty more. The sun will rise to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, and my purse will fill with days as fast as it is emptied.' Weeks! what do they mark but a brief period in our course of toil or pleasure? Months! Do we not sometimes forget whether it is August or September? Years! But here we pause. Days, weeks, months, may preach to us in vain, but years will make us hold and listen especially when we have turned thirty. Before that age most young men are proud of the fact that they are growing older. They hear their seniors prate of their age and experience, and they envy age and experience as, at another period of their existence, they envied whiskers and tail-coats. But when thirty years are passed, and the figures are rapidly leading on to twoscore, a man becomes as unwilling-ay, as unwilling as any woman-to confess that he is as old as he really is. He would like to be thought younger—he would like to be younger.

This is about the time of life when men begin to exclaim

Eheu fugaces anni labuntur!' It has been but a line from Horace hitherto, something to scan, some

thing to quote to show off your Latinity. But now it is a stern, inexorable voice, challenging you on the threshold of a new year. You have serious thoughts now; you are wise now-now that half of your three score is gone. Why were you not serious, why were you not wise before, when you were oneand-twenty, entering upon manhood and life, ten years ago?' Fool, fool, fool! If I had had such thoughts then as I have now, what might I not have accomplished ere this?" Well, it is no use biting your lips, and stamping your foot. It is a true and wholesome proverb which says you cannot put an old head upon young shoulders. There is no fitness in the thing: man must have time to develop his head, as a cabbage must have time to develop its heart. I for one do not believe in William Pitt, prime minister at twenty-three. He might have been as learned as Bacon, but what could he have known of the philosophy of life? How could he have known that which he never saw? Solomon was not wise because he read books.

According to my experience of life derived from observation, and the perusal with the keenest interest of many biographies, thirty' is the golden number in the years of a man's life. This is the middle milestone upon which he rests to survey the past and contemplate the future. Woe to him who does not rest and think now! for at this time the mind is more candid and the heart more open to the touch of truth and tenderness than it ever will be again, until, perhaps, the day when there is no hope left. If you look around in your society, and mark the men who have passed the Rubicon of forty-five or fifty, still retaining health and strength, you will find that the fugaces anni trouble them little. Men at this age think less of death than youths of half their years. They seem to look upon the midway of their age as the crisis of a disease, and that when they have passed this bridge they have got over the worst. I remember, when I first began to think seriously of the fleeting years, asking a boisterous old gentleman if

the thought of his narrowing span ever troubled him. I can recall our brief colloquy word for word.

Ever trouble me! not in the least; not half so much as when I was your age.'

'But,' I said, ' does it never occur to you that your time is getting very short, and that you must go some day soon?'

'Not at all,' he said; 'I am strong and hearty, and I feel to have just as good a prospect of life as ever I had. When I was twenty I thought I should die before I came of age. Now I am sixty-three, I see no reason why I shouldn't live to be a hundred.'

I know my friend well, and I am not going to hold him up as an awful example, for that would be to mistake his case altogether. He is not a man hardened in sin, but a man hardened in years. He has got used to living, and thinks he will live on indefinitely just the same, as a man used to wealth thinks he will always have turtle and champagne for dinner. I don't say that this is not a comfortable state of feeling to arrive at, so as you carry with you a pure heart and a clear conscience; but I think you miss the lesson which chasteneth a man to most profit, and teacheth him most fully the philosophy of life, if you escape over the bridge of mid-life without passing through the valley of the shadow of serious thoughts.

Age does not alone blanch the hair and wrinkle the cheek. I will not say it hardens the heart, but it dulls the feelings and blunts the sensibilities. Neither very young nor very old people feel the loss of friends so keenly as do persons of middle age. The young are too buoyant of spirit to be deeply touched by grief: the old have stood by many graves. At thirty you feel the loss of friends and companions keenly. You set out with them on the journey, full of strength, and life, and hope; and now they have fallen by the wayside, one by one, those you loved best perhaps -and you are alone with strangers. There was a time when you could not have imagined life tolerable without those friends of your heart;

but what have you done when they sank beside you on the road, but paused for a moment, and said, Poor fellow!' dropping a single tear, and passing on. There is a bitter but profitable reflection in this. A man of great mark, much esteemed, and held in high regard by the circle in which he moves, sinks into an untimely grave. Just for the moment there is a hush among those who knew him; a few tears are shed, a few grave looks are interchanged; but to-morrow brings dry eyes and cheerful faces, and his friends eat and drink and make merry before the week is out. The persons who do this are not more heartless than the rest of their kind. It is a failing common to humanity. It is hard to grieve enough. Often and often I have caught myself laughing and making merry when I felt that I had yet a heavy debt of tears to pay to a dead friend. So it will be with you. You will die, and the friends who now grapple you to their souls with hooks of steel' will be gay of heart with the next sun. There are some who ridicule the conventional ensigns of grief, 'the trappings and the suits of woe.' They are wrong. It is the only way in which poor weak humanity can give permanence to its sorrow. Let us show it on our hats, if we cannot in our hearts, that we are grieving for a friend. Let crape redeem our cold stint of tears. I hold that the least we can do for a friend when he is dead is to pay all honour to his remains. When he is alive, do we not set our house in order to receive him; do we not place the choicest viands before him, and allot him our best room? Does he need all the superfluities which we press upon him? No. But we are lavish in our attentions that we may show him respect. And shall we have no further regard for him when the spirit has fled, and his clay-that clay which we honoured so much in the warmth of life has grown cold? Away with your hard shopkeeping maxims! Leave me to pillow the head of my dead friend upon the softest satin, and furnish his last house with becoming state. It is the last service

I can render him. I cannot pay him all the debt of grief I owe him. Let me wring my purse-strings if I cannot wring my heart-strings.

I am reminded of Queen Elizabeth's injunctions to the discursive preacher at Paul's Cross. 'To your text, Mr. Dean-to your text!'

Well, my text is Turning over a new leaf,' and I am coming to the point in my own way. This night when the last, days of the year are ebbing away, a fair hand playing with my dark locks has discovered a gray hair-the first gray hair! I had never seen such a thing-never dreamt of such a thing! At my age: I could not believe it.

It was laid upon a band of black velvet and placed before me.

I can resist conviction no longer. There it lies, blanched and whitewhite as the driven snow! And it is my hair. It seems but yesterday that I was at school, wishing I were a man. And now to-day I am gray, and growing old. What have I done in all this time? Have I fulfilled a man's mission upon earth -have I made any step towards it? Have I done any good in the most infinitesimal degree, for which the world is wiser or better? I cannot answer my own questions. I am dumb, and sitting here contemplating that white hair, with the sense that another year is gliding away, I feel that it is time in right good earnest to turn over a new leaf. I have made the resolution often before, but never under the sense of obligation which now weighs upon me. I remember a certain' Hogmanay' night, ten years ago, when half a dozen young fellows sat round a certain hospitable fire, which has, alas! been quenched. We were not, any of us, in good heart, and we resolved with the new year to turn over a new leaf. It was a trifling proceeding - little better than sport. When twelve o'clock struck, one laid down his pipe, and said, 'From this moment I give up smoking;' another threw his box into the fire, and said, ‘I will snuff no more;' a third said, 'I forswear billiards henceforward;' a fourth resolved to master the German language before that day

twelve months. These were small leaves to turn over; but the result was not unimportant. These vows made in concert, at the midnight hour of the last night of the old year, were kept for twelve months. The smoker and the snuffer relapsed; but the billiard-player broke himself of a passion for play, and was a richer man for it. The aspiring linguist learnt German well enough to read it, and has been a man of more value in his vocation ever since. Would that I could meet all those friends again on the last day of this waning year, that we might resolve anew, and on a broader plan! I would say to them, 'Let us begin the new year with chastened hearts, and with a resolve to shape all our actions by the rule of Christian charity; let us measure all we do by the gauge of truth, for then, whatever be the result, we shall have the consolation of knowing that we have striven to walk in the right path.' But, alas! that same company will never meet together on earth again.

It is the fashion with many persons to dance the old year out, as if it were a matter for rejoicing that another period of life is gone. I hold it is no time for dancing nor for mirth. It is a time for thought and serious reflection; a moment to pause and gird up our loins for a fresh start on the journey of life. The time is peculiarly favourable for making new resolutions, and if they are solemnly made by a family, or social circle, by the fireside, as the bells ring out the knell of the old year, they are more likely to be remembered and kept than if they were made at a less impressive moment.

Thirty years ago, a young man

began to feel the burden of a rapidly increasing family. His companions in the race of life pitied him, and prophesied that he would never get on, with so large a family dragging upon him. The young man himself quailed before his responsibility, and almost lost heart, for he had already seven children, and was little more than thirty years of age. But on the last night of a certain year he made a resolution. He said, 'I will do my duty by my children; I will strain every nerve to give them a good education to fit them for making their way in the world.'

For this end he toiled and slaved, and denied himself; and when his friends and associates saw him in rusty clothes, and with careworn looks, plodding on year after year, getting poorer rather than richer, they sighed for his hard lot, through the curse of a large family that weighed upon him and crushed him.

That imagined curse became a blessing. That man is now in the sere and yellow leaf, happy, contented, and well provided for by his sons and daughters, who, through the superior education they received, are now occupying positions in life which may almost be termed brilliant. This is no parable.

Seize

I have preached my sermon, and have only to add one lastly' to my congregation. Don't dance out the old year; don't let it slip away amid mirth and thoughtlessness. the moment to be sober and thoughtful-to make good resolutions for the future. When these are made, with a strong heart, and a firm will, then may we truly wish each other a Happy New Year.

A. H.