the rams of thy flock have I not eaten. That which was torn of beasts I brought not unto thee; I bare the loss of it; what was stolen by day or stolen by night, of my hands didst thou require it. Thus I was; in the day the drought consumed me, and the frost by night; and my sleep departed from my eyes. Thus have I been twenty years in thy house; I served thee fourteen years for thy two daughters, and six years for thy cattle; and thou hast changed my wages ten times.'

Scarce had he recovered from these evils, when the ill-conduct and vices of his children wound his soul to death. Reuben proves incestuous; Judah adulterous; his daughter Dinah is dishonoured; Simeon and Levi dishonour themselves by treachery; two of his grandchildren are stricken with sudden death; Rachel his beloved wife, perishes, and in circumstances which embittered his loss; his son Joseph, a most promising youth, is torn from him by the envy of his brethren; and, to close all, himself driven by famine in his old age to die amongst the Egyptians-a people who held it an abomination to eat bread with him. Unhappy patriarch! well might he say, 'That few and evil had been his days.' The answer, indeed, was extended beyond the monarch's inquiry, which was simply his age; but how could he look back upon the days of his pilgrimage without thinking of the sorrows which those days had brought along with them? All that was more in the answer than in the demand was the overflowings of a heart ready to bleed afresh at the recollection of what had befallen.

Unwillingly does the mind digest the evils prepared for it by others; for those we prepare ourselves, we eat but the fruit which we have planted and watered,-a shattered fortune, a shattered frame,- -so we have but the satisfaction of shattering them ourselves, pass naturally enough into the habit, and, by the ease with which they are both done, they save the spectator a world of pity. But for those like Jacob's, brought upon him by the hands from which he looked for all his comforts,-the avarice of a parent, the unkindness of a relation,-the ingratitude of a child,-they are evils which leave a scar; besides, as they hang over the heads of all, and therefore may fall upon any, every looker on has an interest in the tragedy. But then we are apt to interest ourselves no otherwise than merely as the incidents themselves strike our passions, without carrying the lesson further. In a word, we realize nothing;-we sigh, we wipe away the tear, and there ends the story of Misery, and the moral with it.

Let us try to do better with this. To begin with the bad bias which gave the whole turn to the patriarch's life,-parental partiality, or parental injustice,-it matters not by what title it stands distinguished-'tis that by which Rebekah planted a dagger in Esau's breast,

and an eternal terror with it in her own, lest she should live to be deprived of them both in one day; and trust me, dear Christians, wherever that equal balance of kindness and love which children look up to you for as their natural right is no longer maintained, there will be daggers ever planted,-'the son shall (literally) be set at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a nian's foes shall be they of his own household.'

It was an excellent ordinance, as well of domestic policy as of equity, which Moses gave upon this head, in the 21st of Deuteronomy.

'If a man have two wives, one beloved and one hated, and they have born him children, both the beloved and the hated; and if the first-born son be hers that was hated, then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit that which he hath, that he may not make the son of the beloved first-born before the son of the hated, which is indeed the first-born: but he shall acknowledge the son of the hated for first-born, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath.' The evil was well fenced against; for 'tis one of those which steals in upon the heart with the affections, and courts the parent under so sweet a form that thousands have been betrayed by the very virtues which should have preserved them. Nature tells the parent there can be no error on the side of affection; but we forget, when Nature pleads for one, she pleads for every child alike; and why is not her voice to be heard? Solomon says, 'Oppression will make a wise man mad.' What will it do, then, to a tender and ingenuous heart which feels itself neglected,-too full of reverence for the author of its wrongs to complain? See, it sits down in silence, robbed by discouragements of all its natural powers to please,-born to see others loaded with caresses: in some uncheery corner it nourishes its discontent, and with a weight upon its spirits which its little stock of fortitude is not able to withstand, it droops and pines away. Sad victim of caprice!

We are unavoidably led here into a reflection upon Jacob's conduct in regard to his son Joseph, which no way corresponded with the lesson of wisdom which the miseries of his own family might have taught him,-surely his eyes had seen sorrow sufficient on that score to have taken warning; and yet we find that he fell into the same snare of partiality to that child in his old age, which his mother Rebekah had shown to him in hers: 'for Israel loved Joseph more than all his children, because he was the son of his old age: and he made him a coat of many colours.'-O Israel! where was that prophetic spirit which darted itself into future times, and told each tribe what was to be its fate? Where was it fled, that it could not aid

thee to look so little a way forwards as to behold this coat of many colours' stained with blood? Why were the tender emotions of a parent's anguish hid from thy eyes?-and, Why is everything?-but that it pleases Heaven to give us no more light in our way than will leave virtue in possession of its recompense.

Grant me, gracious God, to go cheerfully on the road which thou hast marked out !-I wish it neither more wide nor more smooth; continue the light of this dim taper thou hast put into my hands. I will kneel upon the ground, seven times a day, to seek the best track I can with it; and having done that, I will trust myself and the issue of my journey to thee, who art the Fountain of joy,-and will sing songs of comfort as I go along!

Let us proceed to the second great occurrence in the patriarch's life,-the imposition of a wife upon him whom he neither bargained for nor loved. And it came to pass in the morning, behold, it was Leah! And he said unto Laban, What is this thou hast done unto me? Did I not serve thee for Rachel ! Wherefore then hast thou beguiled me?'

This, indeed, is out of the system of all conjugal impositions now, but the moral of it is still good; and the abuse, with the same complaint of Jacob's upon it, will ever be repeated, so long as art and artifice are so busy as they are in these affairs.

Listen, I pray you, to the stories of the disappointed in marriage; collect all their complaints; hear their mutual reproaches! Upon what fatal hinge do the greatest part of them turn? They were mistaken in the person.' Some disguise, either of body or mind, is seen through in the first domestic scuffle; some fair ornament-perhaps the very one that won the heart, 'the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit' -falls off. 'It is not the Rachel for whom I have served; why hast thou then beguiled me?'

Be open; be honest; give yourself for what you are; conceal nothing, varnish nothing; and if these fair weapons will not do, better not to conquer at all than conquer for a day. When the night is passed, 'twill ever be the same story,And it came to pass, behold, it was Leah!'

If the heart beguiles itself in its choice, and imagination will give excellences which are not the portion of flesh and blood, when the dream is over, and we awake in the morning, it matters little whether 'tis Rachel or Leah; be the object what it will, as it must be on the earthly side at least of perfection, it will fall short of the work of fancy, whose existence is in the clouds.

In such cases of deception, let no man exclaim, as Jacob does in his, 'What is it thou hast done unto me?'-for 'tis his own doings; and he has nothing to lay his fault on but the heat and poetic indiscretion of his own passions.

I know not whether 'tis of any use to take

notice of this singularity in the patriarch's life, in regard to the wrong he received from Laban, which was the very wrong he had done before to his father Isaac, when the infirmities of old age had disabled him from distinguishing one child from another:-Art thou my very son Esau? And he said, I am.' "Tis doubtful whether Leah's veracity was put to the same test; but both suffered from a similitude of stratagem; and 'tis hard to say whether the anguish from crossed love in the breast of one brother, might not be as sore a punishment as the disquietudes of crossed ambition and revenge in the breast of the other.

I do not see which way the honour of Providence is concerned in repaying us exactly in our own coin; or why a man should fall into that very pit (and no other) which he has 'graven and digged for another man.' Time and chance may bring such incidents about; and there wants nothing but that Jacob should have been a bad man to have made this a commonplace text for such a doctrine.

It is enough for us that the best way to escape evil is, in general, not to commit it ourselves; and that whenever the passions of mankind will order it otherwise, to rob those at least 'who love judgment' of the triumph of finding it out, -"That our travail has returned upon our heads, and our violent dealings upon our own pates.'

I cannot conclude this discourse without returning first to the part with which it set out-the patriarch's account to the king of Egypt of the shortness and misery of his days. Give me leave to bring this home to us, by single reflection upon each.

There is something strange in it, that life should appear so short in the gross, and yet so long in the detail. Misery may make it so, you'll say,-but we will exclude it; and still you'll find, though we all complain of the shortness of life, what numbers there are who seem quite overstocked with the days and hours of it, and are continually sending out into the highways and streets of the city, to compel guests to come in, and take it off their hands. To do this with ingenuity and forecast is not one of the least arts and businesses of life itself; and they who cannot succeed in it carry as many marks of distress about them as Bankruptcy herself could wear. Be as careless as we may, we shall not always have the power; nor shall we always be in a temper to let the account run thus. When the blood is cooled, and the spirits, which have hurried us on through half our days before we have numbered one of them, are beginning to retire, then Wisdom will press a moment to be heard; afflictions or a bed of sickness will find their hours of persuasion; and should they fail, there is something yet behind: Old Age will overtake us at the last, and with its trembling hand hold up the glass to us as it did to the patriarch.

Dear, inconsiderate Christians, wait not, I beseech you, till then; take a view of your life now. Look back, behold this fair space, capable of such heavenly improvements, all scrawled over and defaced with-I want words to say with what, for I think only of the reflections with which you are to support yourselves in the decline of a life so miserably cast away, should it happen, as it often does, that ye have stood idle unto the eleventh hour, and have all the work of the day to perform when night comes on, and no one can work.

Secondly, As to the evil of the days of the years of our pilgrimage, speculation and fact appear at variance again. We agree with the patriarch that the life of man is miserable; and yet the world looks happy enough, and everything tolerably at its ease. It must be noted, indeed, that the patriarch, in this account, speaks merely his present feelings, and seems rather to be giving a history of his sufferings than a system of them, in contradiction to that of the God of love. Look upon the world he has given us! Observe the riches and plenty which flow in every channel, not only to satisfy the desires of the temperate, but of the fanciful and wanton! Every place is almost a paradise, planted when Nature was in her gayest humour!

Everything has two views. Jacob, and Job, and Solomon, gave one section of the globe; and this representation another. Truth lieth betwixt, or rather, good and evil are mixed up together; which of the two preponderates is beyond our inquiry, but I trust it is the good. First, as it renders the Creator of the world more dear and venerable to us; and, secondly, because I will not suppose that a work intended to exalt his glory should stand in want of apologies.

Whatever is the proportion of misery in this world, it is certain that it can be no duty of religion to increase the complaint, or to affect the praise which the Jesuits' college of Granada gave their Sanchez:-That though he lived where there was a very sweet garden, yet was never seen to touch a flower; and that he would rather die than eat salt or pepper, or aught that might give a relish to his meat.

I pity the men whose natural pleasures are burdens, and who fly from Joy (as these splenetic and morose souls do) as if it was really an evil in itself.

If there is an evil in this world, 'tis sorrow and heaviness of heart. The loss of goods, of health, of coronets and mitres, are only evil as they occasion sorrow; take that out, the rest is fancy, and dwelleth only in the head of man.

likely to continue so to the end of the world, the best we can do in it is to make the same use of this part of our character which wise men do of other bad propensities,-when they find they cannot conquer them, they endeavour at least to divert them into good channels.

If, therefore, we must be a solicitous race of self-tormentors, let us drop the common objects which make us so, and for God's sake be solicitous only to live well.

XXIII.—THE PARABLE OF THE RICH MAN AND LAZARUS CONSIDERED. 'And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one should rise from the dead.'-LUKE XVI. 31.

THESE words are the conclusion of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, the design of which was to show us the necessity of conducting ourselves by such lights as God had been pleased to give us: the sense and meaning of the patriarch's final determination in the text being this, That they who will not be persuaded to answer the great purposes of their being, upon such arguments as are offered to them in Scripture, will never be persuaded to it by any other means, how extraordinary soever. 'If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one should rise from the dead.'

Rise from the dead! To what purpose? What could such a messenger propose or urge which had not been proposed and urged already? The novelty or surprise of such a visit might awaken the attention of a curious unthinking people, who spent their time in nothing else but to hear and tell some new thing; but ere the wonder was well over, some new wonder would start up in its room, and then the man might return to the dead, whence he came, and not a soul make one inquiry about him.

This, I fear, would be the conclusion of the affair. But, to bring this matter still closer to us, let us imagine, if there is nothing unworthy in it, that God, in compliance with a curious world, or from a better motive, in compassion to a sinful one, should vouchsafe to send one from the dead, to call home our conscience, and make us better Christians, better citizens, better men, and better servants to God than we are.

Now bear with me, I beseech you, in framing such an address as, I imagine, would be most likely to gain our attention, and conciliate the heart to what he had to say. The great channel to it is interest; and there he would set out.

twas neither houses, nor land, nor possessions; 'twas neither wives, nor children, nor brethren, nor sisters, which we had to forsake; no one rational pleasure to be given up, no natural endearment to be torn from.

In a word, he would tell us we had nothing to part with but what was not for our interests to keep, and that was our vices, which brought death and misery to our doors.

He would go on, and prove it by a thousand arguments, that to be temperate and chaste, and just and peaceable, and charitable and kind to one another, was only doing that for CHRIST's sake which was most for our own; and that, were we in a capacity of capitulating with God upon what terms we would submit to his government, he would convince us 'twould be impossible for the wit of man to frame any proposals more for our present interests than 'to lead an uncorrupted life, to do the thing which is lawful and right,' and lay such restraints upon our appetites as are for the honour of human nature and the refinement of human happiness. When this point was made out, and the alarms from interest got over, the spectre might address himself to the other passions. In doing this, he could but give us the most engaging ideas of the perfections of God; nor could he do more than impress the most awful ones of his majesty and power: he might remind us that we are creatures but of a day, hastening to the place whence we shall not return; that, during our stay, we stood accountable to this Being, who, though rich in mercies, yet was terrible in his judgments; that he took notice of all our actions, that he was about our paths, and about our beds, and spied out all our ways; and was so pure in his nature that he would punish even the wicked imaginations of the heart, and had appointed a day wherein he would enter into this inquiry.

He might add

But what?-with all the eloquence of an inspired tongue, what could he add or say to us which has not been said before? The experiment has been tried a thousand times upon the hopes and fears, the reasons and passions, of men, by all the powers of nature; the applications of which have been so great, and the variety of addresses so unanswerable, that there is not a greater paradox in the world, than that so great a religion should be no better recommended by its professors.

The fact is, mankind are not always in a humour to be convinced; and so long as the preengagement with our passion subsists, it is not argumentation which can do the business. We may amuse ourselves with the ceremony of the operation, but we reason not with the proper faculty when we see everything in the shape and colouring in which the treachery of the senses paints it; and, indeed, were we only to look into the world, and observe how inclinable

men are to defend evil as well as to commit it, one would think, at first sight, they believed that all discourses of religion and virtue were mere matters of speculation for men to entertain some idle hours with; and conclude, very naturally, that we seemed to be agreed in no one thing but speaking well and acting ill. But the truest comment is in the text,-'If they hear not Moses and the prophets,' etc.

If they are not brought over to the interest of religion upon such discoveries as God has made, or has enabled them to make, they will stand out against all evidence: in vain shall one rise for their conviction; was the earth to give up her dead, 'twould be the same; every man would return again to his course, and the same bad passions would produce the same bad actions to the end of the world.

This is the principal lesson of the parable; but I must enlarge upon the whole of it, because it has some other useful lessons, and they will best present themselves to us as we go along.

In this parable, which is one of the most remarkable in the Gospel, our Saviour represents a scene in which, by a kind of contrast, two of the most opposite conditions that could be brought together from human life are passed before our imaginations.

The one, a man exalted above the level of mankind, to the highest pinnacle of prosperity, to riches, to happiness. I say happiness, in compliance with the world, and on a supposition that the possession of riches must make us happy, when the very pursuit of them so warms our imaginations that we stake both body and soul upon the event, as if they were things not to be purchased at too dear a rate. They are the wages of wisdom as well as of folly. Whatever was the case here is beyond the purport of the parable; the Scripture is silent, and so should It marks only his outward condition, by the common appendages of it, in the two great articles of Vanity and Appetite: to gratify the one, he was clothed in purple and fine linen; to satisfy the other, fared sumptuously every day, and upon everything, too, we'll suppose, that climates could furnish, that luxury could invent, or the hand of Science could torture.

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Close by his gates is represented an object whom Providence might seem to have placed there to cure the pride of man, and show him to what wretchedness his condition might be brought; a creature in all the shipwreck of nature, helpless, undone, in want of friends, in want of health, and in want of everything with them which his distresses called for.

In this state he is described as desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man's table; and though the case is not expressly put that he was refused, yet, as the contrary is not affirmed in the historical part of the parabic, or pleaded after by the other, that he showed mercy to the miserable, we may conclude his

request was unsuccessful; like too many others in the world, either so highly lifted up in it that they cannot look down distinctly enough upon the sufferings of their fellow-creatures, or, by long surfeiting in a continual course of banqueting and good cheer, they forget there is such a distemper as hunger in the catalogue of human infirmities.

Overcharged with this, and perhaps a thousand unpitied wants in a pilgrimage through an inhospitable world, the poor man sinks silently under his burden. But, good God! whence is this? Why dost thou suffer these hardships in a world which thou hast made? Is it for thy honour that one man should eat the bread of fulness, and so many of his own stock and lineage eat the bread of sorrow?-that this man should go clad in purple, and have all his paths strewed with rose-buds of delight, whilst so many mournful passengers go heavily along, and pass by his gates, hanging down their heads? Is it for thy glory, O God, that so large a shade of misery should be spread across thy works? Or is it that we see but a part of them? When the great chain at length is let down, and all that has held the two worlds in harmony is seen; when the dawn of that day approaches in which all the distressful incidents of this drama shall be unravelled; when every man's case shall be reconsidered, then wilt thou be fully justified in all thy ways, and every mouth shall be stopped.

After a long day of mercy, misspent in riot and uncharitableness, the rich man died also: the parable adds, and was buried,-buried, no doubt, in triumph, with all the ill-timed pride of funerals, and empty decorations, which worldly folly is apt to prostitute upon those occasions.

But this was the last vain show; the utter conclusion of all his Epicurean grandeur. The next is a scene of horror, where he is represented by our Saviour in a state of the utmost misery, whence he is supposed to lift up his eyes toward heaven, and cry to the patriarch Abraham for mercy,-' And Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things.'

That he had received his good things-'twas from heaven, and could be no reproach. With what severity soever the Scripture speaks against riches, it does not appear that the living or faring sumptuously every day was the crime objected to the rich man, or that it is a real part of a vicious character: the case might be then, as now, his quality and station in the world might be supposed to be such as not only to have justifierl his doing this, but, in general, to have required it, without any imputation of doing wrong; for differences of stations there must be in the world,-which must be supported by such marks of distinction as custom imposes. The exceeding great plenty and mag

nificence in which Solomon is described to have lived, who had ten fat oxen, and twenty oxen out of the pastures, and a hundred sheep, besides harts and roebucks, and fallow-deer and fatted fowl, with thirty measures of fine flour, and threescore measures of meal, for the daily provision of his table,-all this is not laid to him as a sin, but rather remarked as an instance of God's blessing to him; and whenever these things are otherwise, 'tis from a wasteful and dishonest perversion of them to pernicious ends, and ofttimes to the very opposite ones for which they were granted,-to glad the heart, to open it, and render it more kind.

And this seems to have been the snare the rich man had fallen into; and possibly, had he fared less sumptuously, he might have had more cool hours for reflection, and been better disposed to have conceived an idea of want, and to have felt compassion for it.

'And Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things.' Remember! sad subject of recollection! that a man has passed through this world with all the blessings and advantages of it on his side, favoured by God Almighty with riches, befriended by his fellow-creatures in the means of acquiring them, assisted every hour by the society of which he is a member in the enjoyment of them,-to remember how much he has received-how little he has bestowed!-that he has been no man's friend !-no one's protector!-no one's benefactor!-Blessed God!

Thus begging in vain for himself, he is represented at last as interceding for his brethren, that Lazarus might be sent to them to give them warning, and save them from the ruin which he had fallen into. They have Moses and the prophets,' was the answer of the patriarch; 'let them hear them.' But the unhappy man is represented as discontented with it, and still persisting in his request, and urging, -'Nay, father Abraham, but if one went from the dead they would repent.'

He thought so; but Abraham knew otherwise; and the grounds of the determination I have explained already, so shall proceed to draw some other conclusions and lessons from the parable.

And first, our Saviour might further intend to discover to us by it the dangers to which great riches naturally expose mankind; agreeably to what is elsewhere declared, How hardly shall they who have them enter into the kingdom of heaven!

The truth is, they are often too dangerous a blessing for God to trust us with, or us to manage they surround us at all times with ease, with nonsense, with flattery, and false friends, with which thousands and ten thousands have perished; they are apt to multiply