settle
aught in a world where all seems so temporary, changeful, and uncertain,
that "nought doth endure but mutability?"

Such is and has been the complaint, mixed up of truth and falsehood,
poured out for ages by thousands who have loved (as the world would say)
"too well"--who have tried to build up for themselves homes in this
world; forgetting that they were strangers and pilgrims in it; and so,
when the floods came, and swept away that small fool's paradise of
theirs, repined, and were astonished, as though some strange thing had
happened to them.

The time would fail me did I try fully to lay before you how this dread
and terror of change, and this unsatisfied craving after an eternal home
and an unchanging friendship embittered the minds of all the more
thoughtful heathens before the coming of Christ, who, as the apostle
says, all their lives were in bondage to the fear of death. How all
their schemes and conceptions of the course of this world, resolved
themselves into one dark picture of the terrible river of time, restless,
pitiless, devouring all life and beauty as fast as it arose, ready to
overwhelm the speakers themselves also with the coming wave, as it had
done all they loved before them, and then roll onward for ever, none knew
whither! The time would fail me, too, did I try to explain how after He
had appeared, Who is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever, men have
still found the same disappointment in all the paths of life. Many, not
seeing that the manifestation of an incarnate God was the answer to all
such doubts, the healer of all such wounds, have sickened at this same
change and uncertainty, and attempted self-deliverance by all kinds of
uncouth and most useless methods. Some have shielded themselves, or
tried to shield themselves, in an armour of stoical indifference--of
utter selfishness, being sure that at all events there was one friendship
in the world which could neither change nor fade--Self-love.

Others, again, have withdrawn themselves in disgust, not indeed from
their God and Saviour, but from their fellow-men, and buried themselves
in deserts, hoping thereby to escape what they despaired of conquering,
the chances and changes of this mortal life. Thus they, alas, threw away
the gold of human affections among the dross of this world's comfort and
honour. Wiser they were, indeed, than those last mentioned; but yet shew
I you a more excellen