whether we will beheve it or not : and if any deny it, our answer is, " Let God be true j but every man a har."]
Such being the real state of man, I will endeavour to shew you,
11. The vast importance of being duly impressed with it — It was the want of this knowledge that made the adversaries of David so proud and contemptuous : and it v»^as from a conviction of these truths that David was led so deeply to bewail their infatuation. A due consideration of the shortness and uncer- tainty of life would be of infinite service,
1. To diminish our anxieties about the things of time —
[We should think but little of our pleasures, or riches, or honours, if we considered how short a time they would continue, and that they may all vanish, together with life itself, the very next hour. Examples in abundance there are, in every age and place, to shew the extreme vanity of all that the world calls good and great. It is not in the Bible only that we see those who promised themselves years wherein to enjoy their newly-acquired wealth, cut short, and called in an instant to their great account: we see it continually before our eyes : the messenger of death is sent to manv, who think of their end as little as any of us can do ; and the sentence, " Thou fool, this niglit shall thy soul be required of thee," is executed without any ])revious notice or ex- pectation. If it be thought that still, if not in their own per- sons, yet in their heirs, they enjoy the things for which they have laboured ; I answer, that they are often deprived of those very heirs, on whose aggrandisement they had set their hearts ; and are constrained to leave their wealth to others who are com- parative strangers to them. Moreover, supposing their destined heir to succeed to their wealth, they little know what effect it may have upon him, and whether he may not dissipate it all in a tenth part of the time that it took them to amass it, Solomon mentions this as a very great drawback upon human happiness : *' I hated all my labour which I had taken under the sun ; be- cause I should leave it to the man that shall be after me ; and who knoweth whether he shall be a wise man or a fool? yet shall he have rule over all my labour wherein I have laboured, and wherein I have shewn myself wise under the sun. This is also vanity''." It is probable that Solomon saw how weak his son Rehoboam was : and certainly, of all the instances that
ever ^Eccles. ii. IS, 19.