SERMON IX.

On Numbering our Days.*

PSALM XC. 12.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.

THROUGH what favour of indulgent heaven does this church nourish in its bosom members sufficient to furnish out the solemnity of this day, and to compose an assembly so numerous and respectable? Through what distinguishing goodness is it, that you find yourselves with your children, with your friends, with your fellow citizens; no, not all of them, for the mourning weeds in which some of you are clothed plainly indicate, that death has robbed us, in part, of them, in the course of the year which is just terminated.: But through what distinguishing goodness is it, that you find yourselves with your children, with your friends, with your fellow-citizens, collected together in this sacred place?

The preachers who filled the spot which I have now the honour to occupy, and whose voice resounded through this temple at the commencement of the last year, derived, from the inexhaustable fund of

* Delivered in the church of Rotterdam, on New-Year's day, 1727.

human frailty and infirmity, motives upon motives to excite apprehension that you might not behold the end of it. They represented to you the fragility of the organs of your body, which the slightest shock is able to derange and to destroy; the dismal acci→ dents by which the life of man is incessantly threatened; the maladies, without number, which are either entailed on us by the law of our nature, or which are the fruit of our intemperence; the uncertainty of human existence, and the narrow bounds to which life, at the longest, is contracted.

After having filled their mouths with arguments drawn from the stores of nature, they had recourse to those of religion. They spake to you of the limited extent of the patience and long-suffering of God. They told you, that to each of us is assigned only a certain number of days of visitation. They thundered in your ears such warnings as these: "Gather yourselves together, yea gather together, O nation not desired; before the decree bring forth.... before the fierce anger of the Lord come upon you,” Zeph. ii. 1, 2. “I will set a plumb-line in the midst of my people: I will not again pass by them any more," Amos vii. 8. "Yet forty days and Nineveh shall be overthrown," Jonah iii. 4.

How is it possible that we should have escaped, at the same time, the miseries of nature, and the fearful threatenings of religion? And to repeat my question once more, through what favour of indulgent heaven does this church nourish in its bosom members sufficient to furnish out the solemnity of

this day, and to compose an assembly so numerous and respectable?

It is to be presumed, my brethren, that the principle which has prevented our improvement of the innumerable benefits with which a gracious Providence is loading us, prevents not our knowledge of the source from which they flow. It is to be presumed, that the first emotions of our hearts, when we, this morning opened our eyes to behold the light, have been such as formerly animated holy men of God, when they cried aloud, amidst the residue of those whom the love of God had delivered from the plagues inflicted by his justice, in the days of vengeance: "It is of the Lord's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not: they are new every morning," Lam. iii. 22, 23. “Except the Lord of Hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah," Is. i. 9.

Wo! Wo! Anathema upon anathema! be to him who shall dare henceforth to abuse. . . . . But no, let us not fulminate curses. Let not sounds so dreadful affright the ears of an audience like this. Let us adopt a language more congenial to the present day. We come to beseech you, my beloved brethren, by those very mercies of God to which you are indebted for exemption from so many evils, and for the enjoyment of so many blessings; by those very mercies which have this day opened for your admission, the gates of this temple, instead of sending you down into the prison of the tomb; by those very mercies, by which you were within these few days,

invited to the table of the Eucharist, instead of be ing summoned to the tribunal of judgment; by these tender mercies we beseech you to assume sentiments, and to form plans of conduct, which may have something like a correspondence to what God has been pleased to do in your behalf.

And thou, God Almighty, the Sovereign, the Searcher of all hearts! thou who movest and directest them which way soever thou wilt! vouchsafe almighty God, to open to us the hearts of all this assembly, that they may yield to the intreaties which we address to them in thy name, as thou hast been thyself propitious to the prayers which they have presented to thee. Thou hast reduced the measure of our days to an hand breadth: Ps. xxxix. 5. and the meanest of our natural faculties is sufficient to make the enumeration of them: but so to number our days, as that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom, we cannot successfully attempt without thy allpowerful aid-Lord, so teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. Amen.

In order to a clear comprehension of the words of my text, it would be necessary for me to have it in my power precisely to indicate who is the author of them, and on what occasion they were composed. The Psalm, from which they are taken, bears this inscription, A prayer of Moses, the man of God. But who was this Moses? And on the supposition that the great legislator of the Jews is the person meant, did he actually compose it? Or do the words of the superscription, A prayer of Moses, the man of God, amount only to this, that some one has imitated his

style, and, in some measure, caught his spirit, in this composition? This is a point not easily to be decided, and which indeed does not admit of com plete demonstration.

The opinion most venerable from its antiquity, and the most generally adopted, is, that this Psalm was composed by the Jewish Lawgiver, at one of the most melancholy conjunctures of his life, when after the murmuring of the Israelites, on occasion of the report of the spies, God pronounced this tremendous decree: "As truly as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord.... your carcases shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number.... shall not come into the land, concerning which I sware to make you dwell therein," Num. xiv. 21, 29, 30.

If this conjecture be as well founded as it is probable, the prayer under review is the production of a heart as deeply affected with grief, as it is possible to be without sinking into despair. Never did Moses feel himself reduced to such a dreadful extremity, as at this fatal period. It appeared as if there had been a concert between God and Israel to put his constancy to the last trial. On the one hand, the Israelites wanted to make him responsible for all that was rough and displeasing in the paths through which God was pleased to lead them; and it seemed as if God, on the other hand, would likewise hold him responsible for the complicated rebellions of Israel.