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    since with you nature stands still . To bid youth stand still is often a vam precept . Impetuous passions , quick desires , and eager wishes , agitate their frame , and spring-tides of blood hurry them along . You might as well attempt to stop the rapid , current of a river with your naked hand , as to arrest their career with sentences and maxims . But when the ebb approaches and the tide begins to turn , the flood is suspended in its course , and the lightest leaf will then stand still upon the billowy ridge . And if to stand still be thus natural to your time of life , to consider is not less so .

    Care and consideration , forethought and anxiety , all these you are naturally inclined to . How often have they diverted you from your sweet sleep and necessary refreshments ! Are not your foreheads wrinkled with them even before the time ? Have they not taken the place of the smiles and sports and gay fancies that used to surround you ? Now , then , turn this disposition to account ; now , then , consider not your worldly gains and losses , your worldly views and prospects , but things of infinitely more moment and importance , more worthy to employ a rational mind—the works of God , the

    order of nature , the state and condition of your own souls . The mind has a wonderful power of assimilating itself to the objects with which it is conversant . If these objects are mean and low , it becomes debased and contracted ; if , on the other hand , they are grand and noble , it expands and enlarges itself to fit the size of such exalted contemplations . Just as men who are accustomed to pore over minute and curious trifles , grow very accurate with respect to them , but withal , shortsighted ; whereas those whose way of life leads them abroad to notice distant objects , an extensive landscape , ships under sail , the ocean , improve their faculty of sight , and can

    take in the widest range of vision . Lift up then your eyes , which are so often bent upon the earth , and observe the wonders passing around you . Observe the majestic march of the seasons . How often have you seen summer and winter , seed-time and harvest , succeed each other in regular and beautiful vicissitude . They do not indeed always come as our impatient fancies would have them , for we are too apt to repine . We accuse the lingering summer and the drenching rains , the driving snow and cold easterly blasts , and tremble for our harvests with anxious solicitude , as if we feared upon every little disappointment or irregularity that the eternal order of nature would be broken , and her harmonious chain unloosed . But the

    seasons still return at their due periods ; the winds are not spent with blowing , nor the sun dimmed with shining ; the everlasting lamps have not wasted of their oil , and the bosom of the earth is still fair and fresh and fruitful as when she first came out of the hands of her great Creator . Shall all the wonders of nature pass before you , and will you not stop to consider them ? Can you avoid admiring that wonderful economy by which every species of plants and animals is preserved , so that not the smallest , as we have reason to think , has been lost in the course of revolving ages ? Whose hand , think you , holds the balance , and poises it with so nice a skill that one rank does

    not press or intrude upon another ; that nothing is deficient , yet nothing superfluous , nothing wasted ? What more wonderful than that so many kinds of animals should afford food to their fellow-animals , yet the food never fail nor the species ever be destroyed ? What more surprising than the continual reproduction of the fruits of the earth from the very bosom of corruption and decay , —than the pliability of the various elements and constituent parts of nature , when we want to fashion and convert them to our use , and their resistless force when they are roused to action in the great convulsions of the globe f What more wonderful than that , in the utmost shock and

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    2 New Year Discourse .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1828, page 2, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2556/page/2/