The Difference between Years Past and Years to Come

Of the seeming difference between so many yean pasti and the same number of years to come*

When I look back to the preceding years of my life, how easily can I grasp them all at once! they are even as yesterday when it is past.” But so many years to come have something great and vast, which fills my thoughts and affects my mind after another manner. Such is the difference between past enjoyments and the expectation of future. Let ’ me suppose the same term and duration of years, and yet how different are my apprehensions of what is past, and what is yet to come! Things past, by remembrance of some remarkable passages when they happened, seem to be present with me; but, not knowing what may happen in the same number of years to come, I have nothing whereon to fix my thoughts. Or the reason of this difference may rather be, that men, in this degenerate and necessitous state, (with unsatisfied desires reaching after happiness, and sensible nothing present can afford it, and knowing by experience that nothing past could have done it,) are eagerly desirous of felicity; and, because we know not but what is to come may procure it, we hope it will; which makes the time seem long, by reason of our expectation and desire of good. Whereas the foresight of evil, and the expectation of that, some years hence, make the time rather seem short and near at hand: so many years to come, in the expectation and desire of good, are long and tedious: such hope deferred makes the heart sick;” even though it is of that sort which must needs baulk our expectations.

Prepare me, Lord! for what thine unerring counsel shall please to order, as to the remainder of my time on earth; and suffer me not to count upon a great number of years to come, since this, for ought I know, may be my last: neither let me expect rest and happiness in this world, which nothing temporal can afford. This is not the state, or season, wherein, by any promise of God, I am encouraged to hope for it. And if fifty or threescore years to come be thought so great a matter, and really be so, as to our stay on earth; oh! what apprehensions ought I to admit concerning an endless everlasting state! especially being as certain of the latter, after death, as I am uncertain about the former; whether 80 many years be yet to come before my death. Let me not hereafter be so preposterous in my solicitude, cares, and fears, as to be anxious for to-morrow, and yet be thoughtless of eternity.