fast it is being paid out from the reel, and how far it has run off.

They suggest a momentary consciousness of the swift passage of life,
and naturally lead us to a glance backwards and forwards, both of which
occupations ought to be very good for us. The dead flat upon which some
of us live may be taken as an emblem of the low present in which most
of us are content to pass our lives, affording nowhere a distant view,
and never enabling us to see more than a street's length ahead of us.
It is a good thing to get up upon some little elevation and take a
wider view, backwards and forwards.

And so now I venture to let the season preach to us, and to confine
myself simply to suggesting for you one or two very plain and obvious
thoughts which may help to make our retrospect wise and useful. And
there are two main considerations which I wish to submit. The first is
--what we ought to be chiefly occupied with as we look back; and
secondly, what the issue of such a retrospect ought to be.

I. With what we should be mainly occupied as we look back. Memory, like
all other faculties, may either help us or hinder us. As is the man, so
will be his remembrance. The tastes which rule his present will
determine the things that he likes best to think about in the past.
There are many ways of going wrong in our retrospects. Some of us, for
instance, prefer to think with pleasure about things that ought never
to have been done, and to give a wicked immortality to thoughts that
ought never to have had a being. Some men's tastes and inclinations are
so vitiated and corrupted that they find a joy in living their
badnesses over again. Some of us, looking back on the days that are
gone, select by instinctive preference for remembrance, the vanities
and frivolities and trifles which were the main things in them whilst