A meditation for turning our eyes toawrd eternal realties, in preparation for the Lord’s Day:
If we look on our life, in the several periods of it, we will find it a heap of vanities. ‘Childhood and youth are vanity,’ Eccles. xi. 19. We come into the world the most helpless of all animals, young birds and beasts can do something for themselves, but infant man is altogether unable to help himself. Our childhood is spent in pitiful trifling pleasures, which become the scorn of our own after-thoughts. Youth is a flower that soon withered, a blossom that quickly falls off; it is a space of time in which we are rash, foolish, and inconsiderate, pleasing ourselves with a variety of vanities, and swimming, as it were, through a flood of them. But ere we are aware, it is past, and we are in middle age, encompassed with a thick cloud of cares, through which we must grope; and finding ourselves beset with pricking thorns of difficulties, through them we must force our way, to accomplish the projects and contrivances of our riper thoughts. And the more we solace ourselves in any earthly enjoyment we attain to, the more bitterness do we find in parting with it. Then comes old age, attended with its own train of infirmities, labour, and sorrow, Psal. xc. 10. and sets us down next to the grave. In a word, All flesh is grass, Isaiah xl. 6. Every stage, or period of life is vanity.”
Thomas Boston, Human Nature in Its Fourfold State, 287.