which the wisest and best of us are as helpless as their inferiors, and make even more signal failures. The very man by whom the spirit of God spoke this proverb, filled as he was with wisdom, ran after the idle semblance of pleasure; "forsook," in his own solemn words, "the guide of his youth, and forgot the covenant of his God;" and ended a life of glory in idolatry, and apostasy, and shame. Good King Hezekiah, of whom it is said, that he walked in the way of God, not turning aside to the right nor the left, suffered himself to be puffed up by the splendour of his treasures, and vaunted of them, to the ruin of his country, before the messenger of the King of Babylon. Nor have there been wanting of the wisest and ablest in our own land, who have left names from which no future splendour can purge the spots of darkness, no future admiration of men avert the finger of scorn.
And of what a vast assemblage are these but the nobler examples! How many in all ages, how many in our own age, have been ruined for ever by pursuing what they knew to be a shadow, till it was all too late to grasp the substance! How many now present here, are leading their lives under the same practical self-deceit at this moment; spending their labour for that which is not bread,—accounting as wealth that which they cannot carry away with them when they die: studiously and pertinaciously and elaborately pauperizing themselves, in this life and for the next!
