are many things in his providence, and in our human condition which look as if he had made us in vain ; and that to reason, unenlightened by revelation, it is very hard, if not perfectly impossible, to reconcile much that we see of the providential dispensations of Jehovah with the moral attributes of that infinitely perfect Being. Now there is nothing more true than this. We can demonstrate it; we feel it. Who has not sometimes found himself engaged in a train of thinking like this which the Psalmist details, and who when he has meditated on such facts, has not found himself brought to the same conclusion, and surprised himself in the act of asking questions to the same amount with this, "Wherefore hast thou made man in vain ?"

To direct your attention to some of those facts and phenomena which seem to prove that God has created us unto vanity is the first part of my design; and the second is to show, by several considerations, which I derive from the inspired oracles of God, that these facts do not prove what they appear to prove, and that there is nothing we observe in the Providence of God, which revelation does not enable us to reconcile with the perfections of God.

1. The first fact to which I refer you is one that has frequently and strongly impressed my own mind; it is the almost infinite disproportion which we find to exist between the faculties of man and his actual occupations; his faculties how noble, how solemn, how efficient, his employments how mean, how frivolous, how unprofitable! Who is not struck with the apparent waste of mind? The human soul,

although in all much embarrassed in its operations, and in some making but few and faint discoveries of its real glory, has beyond a doubt, faculties and capacities of the same kind with the angels, and if not quite so high, yet but a little lower in degree than those heavenly beings whose never ceasing occupation is adoration and worship, and whose only study is God. Yet man with talents approaching to the angels, as fit by nature as they to love and contemplate, to praise and study God, how differently is he engaged! in employments some of which require no intellect at all, others but a very feeble degree of it, and all as far below what seems suited to his moral and intellectual nature, as the insignificant labors of an insect are below the dignity of the noble courser. It is like giving one the strength of a giant to do a pigmy's work. The disproportion is not less great. The unsuitableness is not less obvious. The wisdom of the great Dispenser is as hard to be established in the one case as in the other; and it is no wonder if a man finding himself possessed of such powers so meanly set to work, exclaims in view of it "wherefore hast thou made me in vain ?" But I will advance a consideration by and by to show that this fact is far from justifying the exclamation.

2. When we contemplate the equal disproportion between human desires and human attainments, we arrive at the same conclusion. What an amazing inequality between what we find without us, and what we feel within us! The desires of the human soul do not merely transcend its actual attainments, so that it is not in fact satisfied, but they also trans

cend his possible attainments, so that he cannot ever be satisfied from any or all of the things that God has thrown around him. Perhaps there could not be devised a more effectual method to make men miserable than to give them at once all they seek after on earth, and the whole that they could have from this world. They would then perceive immediately its unsatisfactoriness, which now they do not discover, because they are ever engaged in the pursuit of some unattained good that is before them; and there is much more to bear up and satisfy the soul in the pursuit of an unattained object, then there is in the actual attainment of what is sought after. And does not this bespeak vanity, and does it not look as if the God who has planted such unsatisfiable desires within us, has made us in vain? doth it not seem to justify the mournful exclamation of the Psalmist ?

3. But it is particularly when we contemplate the dispensations of God with respect to life and death, that we feel ourselves, almost involuntarily, led to adopt the language of our text. At every step, that we take in the progress of our observations from the cradle to the grave, we find good reason for indulging in this melancholy strain of expostulation; but more especially when we stand over the grave itself, when we look on the last visible end of man, and look into that open place which receives all that is left of love and friendship, and the once warm heart, and the once loving eye and voice that revealed the secrets of the mysterious mind, and then think that there is no man that liveth that shall not see death. Who can

help crying out in agony of soul "wherefore hast thou made all men in vain ?"

Is not this that I am going to describe with few exceptions, the inevitable lot of every man? We look at him now, and he is in trouble and tears; his soul is sunken within him; his spirit is sore wounded ; and the world that yesterday looked so fair and flattering is now all a blank, a vanity. What has happened? The soul that mingled itself with his soul, and intertwined its life with his life, has been suddenly and forcibly disengaged, and is gone, he knows not whither, only he knows it is forever gone. Perhaps it is some poor orphan whose desolation has just been completed; or some lonely widow that has taken final leave of him who was the solace and support of life; or some hoary-headed parent going down mourning to the grave because he is bereaved of his children. We look at him again, and he himself is racked with pain or languishing with debility or loathsome with disease; and now the last sweat of toiling, struggling nature has risen upon him, the last current of life has been thrown out from the exhausted heart, the voice has only strength to whisper a parting and a prayer, the last long difficult breath that bears the soul upon it is breathing, is breathed; and the spirit is clean gone, where? The eye cannot follow it; reason cannot answer, revelation says (with a voice yet more awful than the silence of reason,) to the Judgment. The body is left voiceless, motionless, senseless and only above the other dust, as association endears it. But even that poor relic cannot be kept; it is offensive to the living; it must be taken

away and covered from the sight. And does it not seem as if God had created man unto vanity?

A multitude of facts under this head come crowding upon me, all tending to confirm the same melancholy conclusion, all conducting us into a region of darkness with respect to God which reason has not one ray of light to relieve, and which but for truths which revelation discloses, would enshroud the character of our God forever.

The absolute brevity of human life impresses me; and in this very composition, and in immediate precedence of our text the Psalmist reminds his Maker of it; "remember how short my time is." What a mere moment is the longest term of years, which any are permitted to reach, for such a being as man to live, a being gifted with such intelligence, capable of forming such extensive plans, of engaging in enterprises so magnificent, and of contracting attachments so strong and so lasting; a being above all whose first taste of life creates in him a thirst which nothing but immortality can satisfy. Does it not look as if it would have been better for him never to have lived, if he cannot live without seeing death, and seeing it so soon? or at least would it not have been better to have given him an inferior measure of intelligence, and a less susceptible heart, and to have withheld from his constitution that eager desire of existence which makes death, when contemplated by the unaided mind, so very awful?

That half of all who are born die in infancy and earliest childhood, die before the image of God is seen in them, before their distinctive nature developes