the best opportunity of reaping this sort of spiritual benefit, is, after all, the conclusion of an active day! It is the eventide that brings with it the soberest moral. Hope rises with the sun : life and gaiety advance together with the noise and bustle of a rising world, and we soon mix in the busy scene, and forget its lesson: but, in solemn evening, when the heat is past, and the tumult is over, -when all our occupations have taken their way, and the dark hour is drawing around us its solitary gloom,-then, to walk abroad into the still air, to watch the declining day, or to turn the eye to the starry Heaven; surely, that man must be made of stern materials, who does not feel a solemn composure, a train of meditation, a spirit of melancholy come over him at those seasons, which incline his mind to pass from the fields of time, to views of eternity, and lift him from nature up to nature's God! Now, it is precisely under such cir

cumstances, that the son of Abraham is introduced to us in the words of the text. "And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the eventide." What were the exact subjects of his meditations, no where appears: but, we may get some intimation of them from a knowledge of his state and character. He was a good and religious man, the worthy son of a pious father: he was a young man, just starting in life; and though he was now about to enter upon the most joyous (and deservedly so if prudently undertaken,) of all human alliances, yet he could not enter upon it without a serious sense of the importance of God's accompanying blessing. He went, therefore, into the fields, to meditate-to meditate upon his present, and his future lot; and we may suppose him giving utterance to such sentiments as these:-"The great paths of life are opening before me; henceforth may I be kept in the ways of duty. Earth

has its joys; but many of them are deceitful, and all of them transitory. This very hour reminds me, that I have seen the rising sun,-that I have felt the midday heat, and I now behold the same orb sinking to rest, emblem of mortality! I, also, must flourish, and must fade:-O! may that God who gives an equal care to the humblest flower now about me, as he does to the mighty worlds above, make me to grow up before him as a tender plant:' may He so guide me through the varying stages of my day of trial, that when the darkness of the grave compasseth me about, I may rest in hope, and rise again, like the sun, to another and an eternal day."

My brethren, these are meditations I would willingly encourage in you. Old or young, rich or poor, all have assigned to them a day of life; but, however fair, or however long, the shades of evening will surely come to every one

of us. The longest day must have its night, and the longest life will terminate in death. It is of consequence, then, that we should not forget these truths! It is right that, like Isaac, we should retire for a while, and frequently consider the progress and termination of our projects in the world: we shall be all the better for the reflection. That soldier who contemplates beforehand the chances of war, will face the struggle with a bolder wisdom; and he is best fitted for the chances of this life, and for the changes of a better, who has not driven off the thoughts of them till the moment of their arrival.

With this object in view, it is my intention, on the present, and (with the divine permission) on the following Sundays of Lent, to analyze these probable meditations of Isaac, and to make them our own in their example and application. They were suggested to him under the imperfect dispensation of patriarchal simplicity, when the mind of

man was in spiritual infancy, before even "the law was our schoolmaster to bring us to Christ," and when the word of God, more precious than in the days of Eli, was written only in the great page of Nature. But still Nature is God's book, a book always open,-a book suited to purposes of grace in every age and nation; and thus, each stream, however small, of such heavenly knowledge, flowing into the great channel of the river of life, is sanctified by the Spirit which "moves upon the face of the deep," and should help, even in our days of gospel fulness, to replenish "the wells of salvation," and to furnish to every thirsting soul the waters of life freely.

I shall begin with the personal circumstances of Isaac. Being now in the youthful prime of life, his father was naturally anxious to see him fixed in some regular station; and with this purpose had dispatched one of his most confidential servants to a neighbouring country to fetch, according to a custom