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In a vast number of cases it is more than half gone even in duration; and if we consider the thousand influences which crowd around the years of childhood and youth, winning us to religion, and making a surrender of ourselves to Jehovah easy and pleasant,-and, on the other hand, look forward beyond the years of maturity, and see these in. fluences losing all their power, and the heart becoming harder and harder under the deadening effects of continuance in sin,—we shall not doubt a moment that the years of immaturity make a far more important part of our time of probation than all those that follow."

That pious man, who, while he lived, was the Honourable Charles How, and might properly now be called the honoured, says, that "twenty years might be deducted for education from the threescore and ten, which are the allotted sum of human life; this portion,” he adds, “is a time of discipline and restraint, and young people are never easy till they are got over it."

There is indeed during those years much of restraint, of weariness, of hope, and of impatience; all which feelings lengthen the apparent duration of time. Sufferings are not included here; but with a large portion of the human race, in all Christian countries (to our shame be it spoken), it makes a large item in the account; there is no other stage of life in which so much gratuitous suffering is endured,— so much that might have been spared,-so much that is a mere wanton, wicked addition to the sum of human misery, arising solely and directly from want of feeling in others, their obduracy, their caprice, their stupidity, their malignity, their cupidity, and their cruelty.*

PASSING GENERATIONS.

"The deaths of some, and the marriages of others," says Cowper, "make a new world of it every thirty years. Within that space of time the majority are displaced, and a new generation has succeeded. Here and there one is permitted to stay longer, that there may not be wanting a few grave dons like myself to make the observation."

*The Doctor.

Passing Generations.

Man is a self-survivor every year ;
Man, like a stream, is in perpetual flow.
Death's a destroyer of quotidian prey:
My youth, my noontide his, my yesterday;
The bold invader shares the present hour,
Each moment on the former shuts the grave.
While man is growing, life is in decrease,
And cradles rock us nearer to the tomb.
Our birth is nothing but our death begun,

As tapers waste that instant they take fire.-Young.

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Yet, infinitely short as the term of human life is when compared with time to come, it is not so in relation to time past. A hundred and forty of our own generations carry us back to the Deluge, and nine more of antediluvian measure to the Creation,-which to us is the beginning of time; "for time itself is but a novelty, a late and upstart thing in respect of the ancient of days." They who remember their grandfather, and see their grandchildren, have seen persons belonging to five out of that number; and he who attains the age of threescore, has seen two generations pass away. "The created world," says Sir Thomas Browne, "is but a small parenthesis in eternity, and a short interposition, for a time, between such a state of duration as was before it, and may be after it." There is no time of life, after we become capable of reflection, in which the world to come must not to any considerate mind appear of more importance to us than this; no time in which we have not a greater stake there. When we reach the threshold of old age, all objects of our early affections have gone before us, and in the common course of mortality a great proportion of the later. Not without reason did the wise compilers of our admirable Liturgy place next in order after the form of Matrimony, the services for the Visitation and Communion of the Sick, and for the Burial of the Dead.+

A home-tourist, halting in the quiet churchyard of Mortlake, in Surrey, about half a century since, fell into the following reflective train of calculation of generations :

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I reflected that, as it is now more than four hundred years since this ground became the depository of the dead, some of its earliest occupants might, without an hyperbole, have been ancestors of the whole contemporary English nation. If we suppose that a man was buried in this †The Doctor.

* Dr. Johnson.

churchyard 420 years ago, who left six children, each of whom had three children, who again had, on an average, the same number in every generation of thirty years; then, in 420 years, or fourteen generations, his descendants might be multiplied as under:

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That is to say, nine millions and a half of persons; or, as nearly as possible, the exact population might at this day be descended in a direct line from any individual buried in this or any other churchyard in the year 1395, who left six children, each of whose descendants have had on the average three children! And, by the same law, every individual who has six children may be the root of as many descendants within 420 years, provided they increase on the low average of only three in every branch. His descendants would represent an inverted triangle, of which he would constitute the lower angle.

"To place the same position in another point of view, I calculated also that every individual now living must have had for his ancestor every parent in Britain living in the year 1125, the age of Henry I., taking the population of that period at 8,000,000. Thus, as every individual must have had a father and mother, or two progenitors, each of whom had a father and mother, or four progenitors, each generation would double its progenitors every thirty years. Every person living may, therefore, be considered as the apex of a triangle, of which the base would represent the whole population of a remote age.

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That is to say, if there have been a regular co-mixture of marriages, every individual of the living race must of necessity be descended from parents who lived in Britain in 1125. Some districts or clans may require a longer period for the co-mixture, and different circumstances may cut off some families, and expand others; but, in general, the lines of families would cross each other, and become interwoven, like the lines of lattice-work. A single intermixture, however remote, would unite all the subsequent branches in common ancestry, rendering the contemporaries of every nation members of one expanded family, after the lapse of an ascertainable number of generations."*

AVERAGE DURATION OF LIFE.

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The Assurance of Lives has often been regarded, by weak-minded persons, as an interference with the ways of Providence, which is highly reprehensible. But it can be shown that calculation of lives can be averaged with certainty. Mr. Babbage, in his work on the Assurance of Lives, observes : Nothing is more proverbially uncertain than the duration of human life, where the maxim is applied to an individual; yet there are few things less subject to fluctuation than the average duration of a multitude of individuals. The number of deaths happening amongst persons of our own acquaintance is frequently very different in different years; and it is not an uncommon event that this number shall be double, treble, or even many times larger in one year than in the next succeeding. If we consider larger societies of individuals, as the inhabitants of a village or

* Sir Richard Phillips's Morning's Walk from London to Kew.

small town, the number of deaths is more uniform; and in still larger bodies, as among the inhabitants of a kingdom, the uniformity is such, that the excess of deaths in any year above the average number seldom exceeds a small fractional part of the whole. In the two periods, each of fifteen years, beginning at 1780, the number of deaths occurring in England and Wales in any year did not fall short of, or exceed, the average number one-thirteenth part of the whole; nor did the number dying in any year differ from the number of those dying in the next by a tenth part."

In a paper on Life Assurance, in the Edinburgh Review, the Average Mortality of Europe is thus stated: "In England 1 person dies annually in every 45; in France, 1 in every 42; in Prussia, 1 in every 38; in Austria, 1 in every 33; in Russia, 1 in every 28. Thus England exhibits the lowest mortality; and the state of the public health is so improved, that the present duration of existence may be regarded (in contrast to what it was a hundred years ago) as, in round numbers, four to three."

The Registrar-General gives the following statistical results: "The average age of life is 33 years. One-fourth of the born die before they reach the age of seven years, and the half before the seventeenth year. Out of 100 persons, only six reach the age of 60 years and upwards, while only 1 in 1000 reaches the age of 100 years. Out of 500, only 1 attains 80 years. Out of the thousand million living persons, 330,000,000 die annually, 91,000 daily, 3730 every hour, 60 every minute, consequently 1 every second. The loss is, however, balanced by the gain in new births. Tall men are supposed to live longer than short ones. Women are generally stronger than men until their fiftieth year, afterwards less so. Marriages are in proportion to single life (bachelors and spinsters) as 100: 75. Both births and deaths are more frequent in the night than in the day."

PASTIMES OF CHILDHOOD RECREATIVE TO

MAN.

Paley regarded the pleasure which the amusements of childhood aiford as a striking instance of the beneficence

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