Page:Sermons preached in the African Protestant Episcopal Church of St. Thomas', Philadelphia.djvu/163

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ser. viii.]
uncertainty of time.
19

lightning sometimes his arrows fly, and wound and kill in the twinkling of an eye. Before another day rolls over our heads, for all that we know to the contrary, some one of us may behold that veil removed which now hides from our view, the grand, but awful scenes of the eternal world.

The short and uncertain tenure of human life would be of small moment were it not connected with other results of the most solemn and overwhelming character. God, in his great wisdom and goodness saw fit to create different ranks and orders of beings, and to place them in different localities in his wide dominions, to answer certain good purposes. Upon our earth we behold a variety of living creatures, some of which, so far as we know, have no relation at all to another state of being—all their movements are confined within the small circle of time here allotted to them. But man is placed in circumstances quite different. He, like