On Mortality

1 Kind souls reflect, awhile with me,
Upon our wretched state,
How frail our life, how short our time,
Our miseries, how great.

2 How short the pleasures earth affords,
How transient, and how few,
Compared with heavens eternal joys,
And pleasures ever new.

3 Come let us leave the things of earth,
(Whose pleasures poisons are,)
And haste away to Canaan's land,
And try our interest there.

4 Make the extended skies your tomb,
Let heaven record your worth,
For know: vain mortals all must die:
As nature's sickliest birth.

5 Would bounteous heaven indulge my prayer,
A nobler choice I frame,
Then here to be esteemed great,
Or gain an earthly name.

6 But in thy book of life divine,
My God! inscribe my name:
There let it fill some humble place,
Beneath the slaughtered Lamb,

7 My God! this witness let me have,
Till I resign my breath,
And cheerfully my soul shall wait
Till it is freed from death.

The Christian's duty, exhibited in a series of hymns, 1791