This enrolling of our people every tenth year, each man’s family in his own house, may it not read to us some lessons as Christians; while it affords to those who are set over us in the Lord, the materials for their guidance in the great work of government and legislation? Whether we regard it as private individuals, or as fellow-subjects in that civil community with which the Providence of God has connected us, or as members of the Church of Christ and “heirs together of the grace of life,” [7c] it may suggest to us many reflections of thankfulness, self-inquiry and abasement.
Ten years have passed away since this Census was last taken; and of course by far the larger portion of those here present were at that time included in it. These allotted periods fixed by the institutions of men agree very remarkably with those which the Spirit of God in his word has pointed out as warnings of the shortness and the uncertainty of life. “The days of our age are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.” [8a] If this, then, be the limit to the life of man, what an important portion of it do these latter years contain, quickly as they pass away, and short as they now appear in looking back upon them! It is well known that nearly one-half of the number of deaths that occur among mankind happen before the tenth year of life is completed. Yet have we all been spared, through sickness, and casualties, and during one year of that term through pestilence itself raging at our doors, to see the end of it; and to improve it, as affording a rich fund of opportunities, and warnings, and motives, and principles for the period yet to come. Nor is it only life that has been thus continued to us; but life with all its attendant health, and strength, and reason, and many temporal comforts. And there have been dangers warded off, and blessings multiplied to us in a measure which we should now find it difficult, even with the utmost stretch of memory, to reckon; still less to trace out all those impressions of gratitude and praise towards the Great Dispenser of them all, which each of them, as it passed, ought to have fixed indelibly upon the heart. For these are all the gifts, too often even the unasked gifts, but in every case the undeserved and ill-requited gifts of Him “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” [8b] And in addition to these, how mercifully have our spiritual privileges been continued to us, those which unite us with “Christ the hope of glory,” [8c] and which open to us the supplies of His grace, and which long since ought to have led our affections from earthly to heavenly things. For ten years more has the revealed word of God been spread out before us, “the engrafted word, which is able to save our souls;” [9a] inviting us to “flee from the wrath to come;” [9b] charging us to have our treasure in heaven; and reminding us, wherever we open it, of the things which belong to our eternal peace. For ten years more has His Blessed Son been calling to us to “come to Him that we might have life;” [9c] cheering us with the promise that “whosoever cometh to Him shall in no wise be cast out;” [9d] offering to meet and to bless us with His spiritual presence in the ordinances of His own appointment upon earth, and interceding for us continually before the throne of His Father in heaven. For ten years more has that Spirit who does “not always strive with man,” [9e] been striving with us; often grieved by our coldness, our inconsistency, our unwatchfulness; yet never quite leaving us to ourselves; and even now waiting to be entreated by us, that He may purify and sanctify us wholly. And let me say, that if it is an obvious, it is also a solemn thought, that these ten years have included above 500 Sabbaths; each of which might have been, had we diligently improved them, a new step in our advancement towards heaven. They might have made such an addition to our stock of spiritual knowledge, and strength, and progress, as would ere now have carried us far more onward than we have yet reached towards that “rest which remaineth for the people of God.” [9f]
And then comes the concerning question, from which not one person who hears me can escape; In what manner, to what degree have these advantages been turned to account? These ten years of continued forbearance, and longer trial, and multiplied mercies on the part of our God, do they find us at the close of them living more closely to Him; more desirous of His favour; more afraid of His displeasure; and adorning more, in our life and conversation, the gospel of His own dear Son? So much nearer as we must know ourselves to be to our latter end, are we in any, and in what measure, better prepared to meet it? Do our tempers and pursuits prove us to be, what this new stage of our journey must convince us that we are, mere “strangers and sojourners upon earth,” [10a] seeking “a better country, that is, an heavenly?” [10b] Or rather, are there not some sins still, as in time past, a shame and a burden to us; some evil habits or negligences, some ignorances or omissions yet cleaving to us, and even growing with our growth, and strengthening with our strength? The world, the flesh, and the devil, those three enemies of our souls whom we engaged in our baptism to renounce, have they less power over us than they once had? And do we find in ourselves more readiness to pray, more comfort in our private prayers, more delight in our Sabbaths, more of actual profit from all the means of grace, than we did before? With such an inquiry as this presented to him, and quickened by the thought, that as more time is gone there is so much the less remaining, may not the most advanced and established among us find room for confession and self-abasement? And if this indeed be so, if even “the righteous scarcely be saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?” [10c] Where those who “make a mock at sin,” [10d] “glory in their shame,” and only “mind earthly things?” [10e] What must be their state in the sight of God, and what their aggravated danger, who for ten years more have been “crucifying the Son of God afresh” [10f] by their open unresisted ways of sin, despising the grace of God, and giving a more free indulgence to those very lusts against which the true believers have been at least watching, and contending, and praying?
My brethren, it may seem, no doubt, an alarming reflection, but it is still a faithful saying, and confirmed by all our experience, that if ten years more have not carried us forward in our heavenly course, if they do not find us growing in grace, in the knowledge of ourselves and in the knowledge of Christ Jesus, they will too probably find us confirmed in evil; more estranged from God; more ripe for judgment; the chains of sin bound faster around us, and all our habits more difficult of change; nay, even impossible to be changed, until that Spirit from on high be given us, who can at any time turn a man from darkness to light, but who, the longer He is wilfully slighted, is the less willing to be sought.
These are some of the topics, and, as I well know, they are but a few of them, which a retrospect of this interval might urge upon us as individuals; and these arise only from a review of our own position as the survivors of this new period of probation which the Lord in mercy has permitted us to pass. But I might well ask you to cast your eyes once more back, (it will be wise and profitable for us to do so,) in order that we may call to mind how many persons, some of them dear to us as our own souls, began this same period with us, who have not lived like us to witness its close. If the thought suggests to any of my hearers some recollections of pain, and sorrow, and separation, may they have the grace given them to consider that it is the brightest light which casts the deepest shadows; and that there are trains of thought which can edify while they sadden us; like the shade of Peter’s body, which, as it passed across the multitudes, gave life and health to whatever it obscured. [11a]
The number of interments which have occurred within the last ten years in the three burial grounds of this parish have included more than a fifth part of its population. Such is the sure and rapid way in which, day by day, and year by year, the sentence passed upon our fallen race is fulfilled. “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” [11b] And some of these events, if I could now place them in order before you, have been attended with circumstances so full of awakening instruction, they have proclaimed so distinctly the instability of all earthly ties, the vanity of all expectations that have not heaven for their object, and the love of Christ for their security and their motive, that no louder call could ever be addressed to those who have been most nearly affected by them. And as surely and as quickly will the same mortality proceed during the next decade of the world’s duration. Another like proportion, another fifth, yes, my brethren, one person in five, of those who are assembled here to-day, will be swept off from the engrossing cares and the unsatisfying frivolities of life into the great charnel-house which must ere long receive us all. How many more such ties will be loosened before the same interval recurs again! Those whom we love the best may be taken from us, or we from them, never more to meet until the resurrection of the last day. With such perpetual notices before us of the shortness of our time, and of the momentous nature of that work which it is given us to do, let us resolve to work while it is day. Let us neglect no call; let us abuse no warning; let us lose no opportunity which may assist us in making our “calling and election sure.” [12a] “This I say,” declares St. Paul, with a full conviction of the truth upon his mind, “This I say, that the time is short: it remaineth, that both they that have wives be as though they had none; and they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though they possessed not; and they that use this world, as not abusing it: for the fashion of this world passeth away.” [12b]
Suffer me now to advert to some topics of inquiry which such an occasion as this presents to us, as members of the same civil community, fellow-citizens of the same favoured land, or even as inhabitants of the same parish. There are other mercies for us to review, and there are other grounds of humiliation in the abuse of them, which we have to cherish beyond those which belong to us as private individuals. And to these we cannot safely be indifferent.
Consider the many blessings we have to acknowledge as bestowed upon our country. During the earliest of these intervals fixed for numbering the people, of which we have now reached the sixth, we were engaged in destructive wars, always a source of the most extensive misery and crime. And ever, as the period came round for enrolling our living population, there was an allowance to be made for the losses it had suffered of multitudes who had passed into the grave before their full time, in foreign lands, amidst the horrors of the battlefield or the naval fight, their last hours wanting all the solace of domestic endearment or spiritual comfort. But we have now been mercifully spared for nearly forty years from any general or continued war. Ten years more of almost unbroken peace, or of peace broken only in the remoter dependencies of the empire, have passed over us. And very few of our countrymen, comparatively with other times, have had their lives cut short by a scourge to which the pride and covetousness of mankind are always urging them, but which it may be hoped the God of love and peace, in answer to the prayers of His servants, will continue still to restrain. It was a feeling of the terrors of that scourge which drew from David the affecting entreaty recorded in the chapter before us: “Let us fall now into the hands of the Lord; for his mercies are great: and let us not fall into the hands of man.” [13]
And if it cannot equally be said that our land has been spared from the visitation of pestilence, if it has pleased God, within the last ten years, to send again among us that fearful judgment, what cause had we for thankfulness that even in the midst of that judgment He remembered mercy, and that in the most direct answer to prevailing prayer that we have ever witnessed, He caused the disorder to cease even at the time when it seemed to be defying all human means of restraining it.
There are two aspects in which this new enrolment will present itself to the mind as connected with our national state. And there are different conclusions to be drawn from it, according as they are viewed or not in the light which the Scripture gives us, and tried by the rules which it affords. It may be thought, when this new list is making out of our people from one end of the country to the other, advancing as they probably are in numbers, intelligence, and wealth, the result of it will rather speak the language of exultation than of abasement. While we are arranging in their different classes our men of opulence, and our men of business, and our men of science, “merchants,” like those of the “crowning city,” equal to “princes, and traffickers ranked among the honourable of the earth;” [14a] our cunning artificers and our tillers of the ground surpassing those of other lands in diligence, enterprise, and talent; there is enough here, it may be thought, to assure us that God is well pleased with us, and that all these proofs of worldly prosperity are pledges of His favour. Surely, it will be said by some who witness it, “this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” [14b] And yet let us remember, that the distinctions of nations, like those of individuals, are given to them as talents to be accounted for and improved, not in order to flatter pride, or to promote the comparison of themselves with others. The higher is the measure of our privileges, the heavier is the weight of our responsibilities. These signs of greatness may be found utterly worthless when they are weighed in the balance of the sanctuary, and may be tending only to increase our condemnation. If, indeed, our zeal for God’s glory had kept pace with our experience of His mercies; if, placed as we are at the head of the commerce of the world, our influence reaching to every sea and every shore on which the sun shines, we had carried with us that best of our national treasures, that which is interdicted to some nations, and, alas! as yet unknown to many more, the pure, the full, the free gospel of the grace of God; if, many years ago, we had taken up that position, to the importance of which we seem only to have awakened of late, that of being, as the heralds of the Church, the evangelizers of mankind; if the moral and spiritual improvement of our people at home had advanced as rapidly as their intellectual character, then, indeed, we might have given up the account of our resources with joy and not with grief. But since it is most true, as you yourselves also know, that while the largest funds are never wanting for every scheme, the wildest, the most uncertain, of worldly speculation or display, they are often left to fail, and to fall away, and to be importuned for in the prosecution of the soberest, the most scriptural plans for promoting the glory of God, or the welfare of some distressed portion or other of our fellow-men; if all the boasted improvements in our means of communication are only carrying into the quietest and least corrupted districts of the land new incentives to Sabbath desecration; if while we have been spared from the desolations of foreign war, we are given up, at this very hour, to intestine divisions pervading equally the Church and the State, and upon questions where a Christian people ought to be found essentially agreed; here, again, we have cause rather to humble than to exalt ourselves, and to fear lest our God should enter into judgment with us for this poor requital of all the distinctions with which we have been blessed.