Time Measured by Eternity - Heman Humphrey Sermon "Ye men of business and of might, in the high meridian of your course. What is your life ? Were we to make up an estimate from your daily conversation, from the eagerness of your worldly pursuits, from your extensive plans, and far-reaching expectations,we must suppose you exempted from the common lot of mortality. But no estimate can be more delusive. Strip your life then of these fictitious and imposing circumstances, and what is it but a vapor ? What obstacle does your fine constitution oppose to the ravages of disease ?—to the stroke of death? How many firmer have fallen in a few days, or hours?" Heman Humphrey (March 26, 1779 – April 3, 1861) was a 19th-century American author and clergyman who served as 2nd president of Amherst College for 22 years. He was born in Hartford County, Connecticut. He graduated from Yale University with an A.M. in 1805. Humphrey was ordained a Congregational minister on March 16, 1807. He became a minister in Fairfield, Connecticut in 1807, moving to Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1817. In 1825 he was appointed president of Amherst. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1842. Humphrey was influential in the nineteenth-century temperance movement and typical of the early proponents of prohibition. He was the father of U.S. Representative James Humphrey. Biography: Heman Humphrey was born in West Simsbury (which became Canton, Connecticut), in Hartford county. His father's name was Solomon Humphrey, descended in direct line from Michael Humphrey, an immigrant who came from England some time before 1643. Heman's mother Hannah Brown Humphrey was the second wife of Solomon and was the eldest of the six children of Captain John Brown, who died on June, 1776, during the American Revolution in defense of New York. Heman's father Solomon was a farmer and moved from Simsbury in 1755, first to Bristol and then to Barkhamstead, where he died in 1834.