“For fools rush in, where angels fear to tread.”

Of our inquietudes of mind, his account is still less reasonable:  “Whilst men are injured, they must be inflamed with anger; and, whilst they see cruelties, they must be melted with pity; whilst they perceive danger, they must be sensible of fear.”  This is to give a reason for all evil, by showing, that one evil produces another.  If there is danger, there ought to be fear; but, if fear is an evil, why should there be danger?  His vindication of pain is of the same kind:  pain is useful to alarm us, that we may shun greater evils, but those greater evils must be pre-supposed, that the fitness of pain may appear.

Treating on death, he has expressed the known and true doctrine with sprightliness of fancy, and neatness of diction.  I shall, therefore, insert it.  There are truths which, as they are always necessary, do not grow stale by repetition

  “Death, the last and most dreadful of all evils,
  is so far from being one, that it is the infallible
  cure for all others.

  To die, is landing on some silent shore,
  Where billows never beat, nor tempests roar. 
  Ere well we feel the friendly stroke, ’tis o’er.

  GARTH.

For, abstracted from the sickness and sufferings usually attending it, it is no more than the expiration of that term of life God was pleased to bestow on us, without any claim or merit on our part.  But was it an evil ever so great, it could not be remedied, but by one much greater, which is, by living for ever; by which means, our wickedness, unrestrained by the prospect of a future state, would grow so insupportable, our sufferings so intolerable by perseverance, and our pleasures so tiresome by repetition, that no being in the universe could be so completely miserable, as a species of immortal men.  We have no reason, therefore, to look upon death as an evil, or to fear it as a punishment, even without any supposition of a future life:  but, if we consider it, as a passage to a more perfect state, or a remove only in an eternal succession of still-improving states, (for which we have the strongest reasons,) it will then appear a new favour from the divine munificence; and a man must be as absurd to repine at dying, as a traveller would be, who proposed to himself a delightful tour through various unknown countries, to lament, that he cannot take up his residence at the first dirty inn, which he baits at on the road.

“The instability of human life, or of the changes of its successive periods, of which we so frequently complain, are no more than the necessary progress of it to this necessary conclusion; and are so far from being evils, deserving these complaints, that they are the source of our greatest pleasures, as they are the source of all novelty, from which our greatest pleasures are ever derived.  The continual succession of seasons in the human life, by daily presenting to us new scenes, render it agreeable,