take is irremediable; we die only once, and our past folly can no more serve as a lesson to guard us from future error. Our misfortunes indeed open our eyes; but these new lights, which dissipate our blindness, become useless, by the immutability of our state, and are rather a cruel knowledge of our misery, which prepares to tear us with eternal remorse, and to occasion the most grievous portion of our punishment, than wise reflections which may lead us to repentance.
Upon what, then, can you justify this profound and incomprehensible neglect of your last day, in which you live? On youth, which may seem to promise you many years yet to come?
Youth! But the son of the widow of Nain was young. Does death respect ages or rank? Youth! But that is exactly what makes me tremble for you: licentious manners, pleasures to excess, extravagant passions, ambitious desires, the dangers of war, thirst for renown, and the sallies of revenge; is it not during the pursuit or gratification of some one of these passions, that the majority of men finish their career? Adonias, but for his debaucheries, might have lived to a good old age; Absalom, but for his ambition; the king of Sachem's son, but for his love of Dinah; Jonathan, had glory not dug a grave for him in the mountains of Gilboa. Youth! Alas! it is the season of dangers, and the rock upon which life generally splits.
Once more, then, upon what do you found your hopes? On the strength of your constitution? But what is the best established health? A spark which a breath shall extinguish; a single day's sickness is sufficient to lay low the most robust. I examine not after this, whether you do not even flatter yourselves on this point; if a body, exhausted by the irregularities of youth, do not announce to your own minds the sentence of death; if habitual infirmities do not lay open before you the gates of the grave; if disagreeable indications do not menace you with some sudden accident. I wish you to lengthen out your days even beyond your hopes. Alas! my brethren, can any period appear long which must at last come to an end? Look back, and see where now are your youthful years? What trace of solid joy do they leave in your remembrance? Not more than a vision of the night; you dream that you have lived, and behold all that is left to you of it; all that interval, elapsed from your birth to the present day, is like a rapid flash, whose passage the eye, far from dwelling on, can with difficulty see. Had you begun to live even with the world itself, the past would now appear to you neither longer nor more real: all the ages elapsed down to the present day you would look upon as fugitive instants; all the nations which have appeared and disappeared on the earth; all the revolutions of empires and kingdoms; all those grand events which embellish our histories, to you would be only the different scenes of a show which you had seen concluded in a day. Recollect the victories, the captured cities, the glorious treaties, the magnificence, the splendid events of the first years of this reign; most of you have not only witnessed, but have
