Page:The Works of Samuel Johnson ... A journey to the Hebrides. The vision of Theodore, the hermit of Teneriffe. The fountains. Prayers and meditations. Sermons.v. 10-11. Parliamentary debates.pdf/364

 shown the instability of all human happiness, I hope it will not be requisite to enforce the necessity of securing to themselves a state of unshaken security, and unchangeable enjoyment. To inculcate the shortness of life to those who feel hourly decays, or to expatiate on the miseries of disease and poverty to them whom pain perhaps, at this instant, is dragging to the grave, would be needless waste of that time which their condition admonishes them to spend, not in hearing, but in practising their duty. And of sickness, charity seems the peculiar employment, because it is an act of piety which can be practised with such slight and transient attention as pain and faintness may allow. To the sick, therefore, I may be allowed to pronounce the last summons to this mighty work, which, perhaps, the Divine providence will allow them to hear. Remember thou! that now faintest under the weight of long-continued maladies, that to thee, more emphatically, the night cometh in which no man can work; and, therefore, say not to him that asketh thee, "Go away now, and to-morrow I will give." To-morrow! To-morrow is to all uncertain, to thee almost hopeless; to-day, if thou wilt hear the voice of God calling thee to repentance, and by repentance to charity, harden not thy heart; but what thou knowest that in thy last moment thou shalt wish done, make haste to do, lest thy last moment be now upon thee.

And let us all, at all times, and in all places, remember, that they who have given food to the hungry, raiment to the naked, and instruction to the ignorant, shall be numbered by the Son of God amongst the blessed of the Father.