not being moved.

Long peace rusts the cannon, and is apt to make it unfit for war. Our
lack of imagination, and our present sense of comfort and well-being,
tend to make us fancy that we shall go on for ever in the quiet jog-trot
of settled life without any very great calamities or changes. But there
was once a village at the bottom of the crater of Vesuvius, and great
trees, that had grown undisturbed there for a hundred years, and green
pastures, and happy homes and flocks. And then, one day, a rumble and a
rush, and what became of the village? It went up in smoke-clouds. The
quiescence of the volcano is no sign of its extinction. And as surely as
we live, so sure is it that there will come a 'to-morrow' to us all
which shall _not_ be as this day. No man has any right to calculate upon
anything beyond the present moment, and there is no basis whatever,
either for the philosophical assertion that the order of nature is
fixed, and that therefore there are no miracles, or for the practical
translation of the assertion into our daily lives, that we may
reasonably expect to go on as we are without changes or calamities.
There is no reason capable of being put into logical shape for believing
that, because the sun has risen ever since the beginning of things, it
will rise to-morrow, for there will come a to-morrow when it will _not_
rise. In like manner, the longest possession of our mercies is no reason
for forgetting the precarious tenure on which we hold them all.

So, Christian men and women! let us try to keep vivid that consciousness
which is so apt to get dull, that nothing continueth in one stay, and
that we _shall_ be moved, as far as the outward life and its
circumstances are concerned. If we forget it, we shall need, and we
shall get, the loving Fatherly discipline, which my second text tells us
followed the false security of this good man. The sea is kept from