e would once lay these in the balance together,--this present life and
life eternal! Know ye not that your souls are created for eternity; that
they will eternally survive all these present things? Now how do ye
imagine they shall live after this life? Your thoughts and projects and
designs are confined within the poor narrow bounds of your time. When you
die, in that day your thoughts shall perish. All your imaginations and
purposes and providences shall have an end then; they reach no farther
than that time. And if you should wholly perish too, it were not so much
matter. But for all your purposes and projects to come to an end, when you
are but beginning to live, and enter eternity, that is lamentable indeed!
Therefore I say, consider what ye are doing, weigh these in a
balance,--eternal life and the present life; if there were no more
difference but the continuance of the one, and the shortness of the
other,--that the world's standing is but as one day, one moment to
eternity,--that ought to preponderate in your souls. Do we not here flee
away as a shadow upon the mountains? Are we not as a vapour that ascends,
and for a little time appears a solid body, and then presently vanisheth?
Do we not come all into the stage of the world, as for an hour, to act our
part and be gone; now then, what is this to endless eternity? When you
have continued as long as since the world began, you are no nearer the end
of it. Ought not that estate then to be most in your eyes, how to lay up a
foundation for the time to come? But then, compare the misery and the
vexation of this life with the glory and felicity of this eternal life.
What are our days? But few and full of trouble. Or, if you will, take the
most blessed estate you have seen and heard of in this world, of kings and
rich men, and help all the defects of it by your imaginations; suppose
unto yourselves the height and pitch of glory and abundance and power that
is attainable on earth; and when your fancy hath busked up such a
felicity, compare it with an eternal life: O how will that vanish out of
your imaginations! If so be you know any thing of the life to come, you
will even think that an odious comparison,--you will think all that earthly
felicity but light as vanity, "every man at his best estate is altogether
vanity." Eternal life will weigh down eternally, 2 Cor. iv. 17, 18. O but
it hath an exceeding weight in itself,--one moment of it, one hour's
possession and taste o