favour, and consideration drag after them, affects, attracts, and transports us. Thus, the majority of men inconsiderately create to themselves a tumultuous and agitated life, which the Almighty never required of them, and eagerly seek for cares where they cannot be in safety, unless the order of God had prepared them for us.
Indeed, we sometimes hear them complaining of the endless agitations inseparable from their places; sighing for rest, and envying the lot of a tranquil and private station; repeating, that it should indeed be time to live for themselves, after having so long lived for others. But these are merely words of course; they seem to groan under the weight of affairs; but with much more uneasiness and grief would they support the weight of leisure and of a private condition: they employ one part of their life in struggling against each other for the tumult of places and employments, and the other they employ in lamenting the misfortune of having obtained them. It is a language of vanity: they would wish to appear superior to their fortune; and they are not so to the smallest reverse, or the slightest symptom of coldness which threatens them. Behold how our passions create occupations and embarrassments, which God required not, and deprive us of a time whose value we shall be ignorant of till we reach that moment when time finishes and eternity begins.
Yet still, my brethren, in the midst of the endless occupations attached to your stations, were you to regard as the most privileged those connected with your salvation, you would, in some measure at least, repair the dissipation of that portion of your life, which the world and the cares of this earth entirely occupy. But it is still on this point that our blindness is deplorable; we cannot find time for our eternal salvation. That which we bestow on fortune, the duties of a charge, the good offices expected from our station, the care of the body, and attention to dress; that which we give to friendship, society, recreation, and custom, all appear essential and indispensable: we even dare not encroach upon or limit these; we carry them beyond the bounds even of reason and necessity; and as life is too short, and our days too rapid to suffice for all, whatever we retrench is from the cares of our salvation: in the multiplicity of our occupations we are sure to sacrifice those which we ought to bestow on eternity. Yes, my brethren, in place of retrenching from our amusements, from the duties which ambition multiplies, from the ceremonies which idleness alone has established, from the cares and attentions we bestow on a vain dress which custom and effeminacy have rendered endless; in place of retrenching from these, at least some little time every day, scarcely do they leave us some accidental remains which by chance have escaped from the world and pleasure; some rapid moments the world wishes not, with which we are perhaps embarrassed, and which we know not how to dispose of otherwise. So long as the world chooses to engage us; so long as it continues to offer pleasures, duties, trifles, and complaisances, we yield ourselves up
