your obligations: guilt must be punished, in order to be effaced. The Almighty had allowed you both time and strength to satisfy this immutable and eternal law: this time you have wasted in accumulating new debts: this strength you have exhausted, either by new excesses, or at least without making any use of it, to further the designs of God respecting you: the Almighty must therefore do, what you have never done yourselves, and punish, after your death, the crimes you have never been inclined to expiate during your life.
This is to say, in order to concentrate all these reflections, that with every moment of our life it is as with our death. We die only once, and from thence we conclude, that we must die in a proper state, because there is no longer a possibility of returning, to repair, by a second death, the evil of the first. In like manner, we only once exist, such and such moments: we cannot return upon our steps, and, by commencing a new road, repair the errors and faults of our first path j in like manner, every moment of our life which we sacrifice becomes a point fixed for our eternity; that moment lost, shall change no more: it shall eternally be Jthe same; it will be recalled to us, such as we had passed it, and will be marked with that ineffaceable stamp. How miserable, then, is our blindness, my brethren; we, whose life is only one continued attention to lose the time which returns no more, and, with so rapid a course, flies to precipitate itself into the abyss of eternity!
Great God! Thou who art the sovereign dispenser of times and moments; thou, in whose hands are our days and our years, with what eyes must thou behold us losing and dissipating the moments of which thou alone knowest the duration; of which, in irrevocable characters, thou hast marked the course and the measure; moments, which thou drawest from the treasure of thine eternal mercies, to allow us time for penitence; moments which, every day, thy justice presses thee to abridge, as a punishment for their abuse; moments which, every day before our eyes, thou refusest to so many sinners, less culpable than we, whom a terrible death surprises and drags into the gulf of thine eternal vengeance; moments, in a word, which we shall not perhaps long enjoy, and of which thou soon intendest to terminate the melancholy career! Great God! Behold the greatest and best part of my life already past and wholly lost. In all my days, there has not hitherto been a single serious one, — a single day for thee, for my salvation, and for eternity: my whole life is but a vapour, which leaves nothing real or solid in the hand of him who recalls it. Shall I, to the end, drag on my days in this melancholy inutility; in this weariness which pursues me, in the midst of my pleasures, and the efforts which unavailingly I make to avoid it? Shall the last hour surprise me, loaded with the void of my whole years? And, in all my course, shall there be nothing serious or important but the last moment, which will terminate it for ever, and decide my everlasting destiny? Great God! what a life for a soul destined to serve thee, called to the immortal society of thy Son and thy saints, enriched
