SERMON I.

On the CAUSES of MEN'S being weary

of Life.

JOB, X. I.

My soul is weary of my life.

OB, in the first part of his days, SERMON Jwas the greatest of all the men

of the East. His possessions were large; his family was numerous and flourishing; his own character was fair and blameless. Yet this man it pleased God to visit with extraordinary reverses of fortune. He was robbed of his whole substance. His sons and daughters all perished; and he himself, fallen from his high estate, childless, and reduced to poverty, was smitten VOL. IV.

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with

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SERMON with sore disease. His friends came about I. him, seemingly with the purpose of administering comfort. But from a harsh and ill-founded construction of the intention of Providence in his disasters, they only added to his sorrows by unjust upbraiding. Hence those many pathetic lamentations with which this Book abounds, poured forth in the most beautiful and touching strain of Oriental poetry. In one of those hours of lamentation, the sentiment in the text was uttered; My soul is weary of my life; a sentiment, which surely, if any situation can justify it, was allowable in the case of Job.

In situations very different from that of Job, under calamities far less severe, it is not uncommon to find such a sentiment working in the heart, and sometimes breaking forth from the lips of men. Many, very many there are, who, on one occasion or other, have experienced this weariness of life, and been tempted to wish that it would come to a close, Let us now examine in what circumstances this feeling may be deemed excus

I.

able; in what it is to be held sinful; and SERMON under what restrictions we may, on any occasion, be permitted to say, My soul is weary of my life.

I SHALL Consider the words of the text in three lights: as expressing, First, The sentiment of a discontented man: Secondly, The sentiment of an afflicted man; Thirdly, The sentiment of a devout man.

I. Let us consider the text as expressing the sentiment of a discontented man; with whom it is the effusion of spleen, vexation, and dissatisfaction with life, arising from causes neither laudable nor justifiable. There are chiefly three classes of men who are liable to this disease of the mind; the idle; the luxurious; the criminal.

First, THIS weariness of life is often found among the idle; persons commonly in easy circumstances of fortune, who are not engaged in any of the laborious Occupations of the world, and who are at the same time, without energy of mind to call them forth into any other line of B 2 active

SERMON active exertion.

I. ther topid state,

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In this languid, or rathey have so many vacant hours, and are so much at a loss how to fill up their time, that their spirits utterly sink; they become burdensome to themselves, and to every one around them ; and drag with pain the load of existence. What a convincing proof is hereby afforded, that man designed by his Creator to be an active being, whose happiness is to be found not merely in rest, but in occupation and pursuit! The idle are doomed to suffer the natural punishment of their inactivity and folly; and from their complaints of the tiresomeness of life there remedy but to awake from the dream of sloth, and to fill up with proper employment the miserable vacancies of their days. Let them study to become useful to the world, and they shall soon become less burdensome to themselves. They shall begin to enjoy existence; they shall reap the rewards which Providence has annexed to virtuous ac tivity; and have no more cause to say My soul is weary of my life.

is no

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Next, THE luxurious and the dissipated SERMON form another class of men, among whom such complaints are still more frequent. With them they are not the fruit of idleness. These are men who have been busied enough; they have run the whole race of pleasure; but they have run it with such inconsiderate speed, that it terminates in weariness and vexation of spirit. By the perpetual course of dissipation in which they are engaged; by the excesses which they indulge; by the riotous revel, and the midnight, or rather morning, hours to which they prolong their festivity; they have debilitated their bodies, and worn out their spirits. Satiated with the repetition of their accustomed pleasures, and yet unable to find any new ones in their places; wandering round and round their former haunts of joy, and ever returning disappointed; weary of themselves, and of all things about them, their spirits are oppressed with a deadly gloom, and the complaint bursts forth of odious life and, a miserable world. Never are these complaints more frequent than at the close