But delay is no evidence of indifference; and if justice have hitherto slept, it is to be apprehended it will rise with recruited vigour. While you go on still in your trespasses, be assured the glittering sword is drawing from its scabbard--it is even whetting to the final stroke! Rebekah. Chapter V. Section I. Progress of Time--Patriarchal mode of Living--Abraham's Solicitude respecting the Settlement of his Son--sends his Servant to procure him a Wife--his Arrival in the Vicinity of Nahor--his Meeting with Rebekah--her Behaviour, and their Conversation--the Good Qualities already discoverable in Rebekah, which render her Worthy of Imitation--her industrious and domesticated Habits--Unaffected Simplicity--Modesty--Courtesy--Humanity. Rapid, irresistible, and certain is the progress of time. The few incidents of which human life consists, transpire in quick succession; the few years of which it is composed, even in cases of the greatest longevity, soon elapse: the cradle and the grave seem placed very near each other; and scarcely does the voice of congratulation cease at our birth, before it is succeeded by the lamentations of sorrow at our funeral. There is a wide difference, however, in the actual impression, between passing through the details of existence in daily and hourly engagements, which, from their variety, produce an illusion of slowness and a vague idea of almost interminable continuance, and looking at expended years _after their termination_, or at successive lives in the perspective of history. In the latter case, events appear crowded together, the intervening spaces are riot distinctly perceptible, and the distance is diminished. If the life of an Abraham, an Isaac, or a Jacob, had been presented to us in the form of a daily journal of occurrences, how easily might it have been expanded into a volume equal in dimensions to the whole inspired record; and how distant would each eventful period of their respective lives have appeared! how vast would have seemed the space between them if minuter circumstances had been formally detailed in the order of months, and days, and hours! Even a single year assumes a considerable magnitude when viewed as three hundred and sixty-five days, each day and night as four-and-twenty hours, each hour as sixty successive minutes, and each minute or hour as occupied with its appropriate and necessary engagements: but when we ascend that elevated spot to which history conducts us, and look back upon the long track of time, and through the course of revolving centuries, we reflect at once on those images of Scripture with which our imagination has been so often arrested, and see that the motion of the "weaver's shuttle" scarcely represents the "swiftness" of our days; the passing shadows that fly across the plain, imperfectly display the nothingness of fleeting years; "the little time" in which the "vapour appeareth," is but faintly expressive of the manner