A Farewell Sermon

If the call hence comes in somewhat of maturer years, though still in the days of youth, the young man will have lived long enough to have learned the rudiments of saving knowledge, and to have practised the first lessons of Christian faith and Christian duty; and thus the best end for which the loan of life was given, will have found that happy earnest of its future fulness.

If, again, the thread of life shall have been continued to later periods of its course, no doubt the opportunities for all those advantages to which life can minister, will render it at all times a blessing and a boon.  Nor will you wonder, in comparing the longer with the shorter term of life, that the suit of supplicating parents in our Lord’s days, whether for the child or for the youth, was so often granted by a restoration to a more protracted term of life.