Inquietudes of mind cannot be prevented without first eradicating all our inclinations and passions, the winds and tides that preserve the great ocean of human life from perpetual stagnation. So long as men have pursuits, they must meet with disappointments; and whilst they have disappointments they must be disquieted; whilst they are injured, they must be enflamed with anger; and whilst they see cruelties, they must be melted with pity; whilst they perceive danger, they must be sensible of fear; and whilst they behold beauty, they must be enslaved by love; nor can they be exempted from the various anxieties attendant. on these various and turbulent passions. Yet without them we should be undoubtedly less happy and less safe; for without anger we should not defend ourselves, and without pity we should not assist others; without fear we should not preserve our lives, and without love they would not be worth preserving. Pains of body are perhaps but the necessary consequences of the union of material and spiritual essences; for matter being by nature divisible, when endued with sensibility, must probably be affected by pains and pleasures by its different modifications: wherefore, to have been freed from our sufferings, we must have been deprived of all our sensual enjoyments; a composition by which few surely would be gainers. Besides, the pains of our bodies are necessary to make us continually mindful of their preservation; for what numberless lives would be lost in every trifling pursuit, or flung away in ill humour, was the piercing of a sword no more painful than the tickling of a feather. Death, the last and most dreadful of all evils, is so far from being one, that it is the infallible cure of all others. To die is landing on some silent shore, GARTH. For, abstracted from the sickness and sufferings usually attending it, it is no more than the expiration of that term of life, God has 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 forever; 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 the hasty chan ges 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, renders it agreeable, and like those of the year, affords us delights by their change, which the choicest of them could not give us by their continuance. In the spring of life, the gilding of the sunshine, the verdure of the fields, and the variegated paintings of the sky, are so exquisite in the eyes of infants at their first looking abroad into a new world, as nothing perhaps afterwards can equal. The heat and vigour of the succeeding summer of youth ripens for us new pleasures, the blooming maid, the nightly revel, and the jovial chace; the serene autumn of complete manhood feasts us with the golden harvests of our worldly pursuits; nor is the hoary winter of old age destitute of its peculiar comforts and enjoyments, of which the recollection and relation of those past are perhaps none of the least; and at last death opens to us a new prospect, from whence we shall probably look back upon the diversions and occupations of this world with the same contempt we do now on our tops, and hobby-horses, and with the same surprise, that they could ever so much entertain or engage us. Thus we see all these evils could never have been prevented even by infinite power, without the introduction of greater, or the loss of superior good; they are but the necessary consequences of human nature; from which it can no more be divested, than matter from extension, or heat from motion, which proceed from the very modes of their existence. If it be objected, that, after all that has been said, there are innumerable miseries entailed upon all things that have life, and particularly on man; many diseases of the body, and afflictions of mind, in which nature seems to play the tyrant, ingenious in contriving torments for her children; that we cannot avoid seeing every moment with horror, numbers of our fellow-creatures condemned to tedious and intolerable miseries, some expiring on racks, others roasting in flames, some starving in dungeons, others raving in mad-houses; some broiling in fevers, others groaning whole months under the exquisite tortures of gout and stone. If it be said further, that some men being exempted from many calamities with which others are afflicted proves plainly that all might have been exempted from all; the charge can by no means be disputed, nor can it be alleged that infinite power could not have prevented most of these dreadful calamities. From hence therefore I am persuaded, that there is something in the abstract nature of pain, conducive to pleasure; that the sufferings of individuals are absolutely necessary to universal happiness; and that, from connections to us inconceivable, it was impracticable for omnipotence to produce the one, without at the same time permitting the other. Their constant and uniform concomitancy through every part of nature with which we are acquainted, very much corroborates this conjecture, in which scarce one instance, I believe, can be produced of the acquisition of pleasure or convenience by any creatures which is not purchased by the previous or consequential sufferings of themselves or others; pointing out, as it were, that a certain allay of pain must be cast into the universal mass of created happiness, and inflicted somewhere for the benefit of the whole. Over what mountains of slain is every mighty empire rolled up to the summit of prosperity and luxury, and what new scenes of desolation attend its fall? To what infinite toil of men, and other animals is every flourishing city indebted for all the conveniences and enjoyments of life, and what vice and misery do those very enjoyments introduce? The pleasures peculiar to the continuing our species are severely paid for by pains and perils in one sex, and by cares and anxieties in both. Those annexed to the preservation of ourselves are both preceded and followed by numberless sufferings; preceded by the massacres and tortures of various animals preparatory to a feast, and followed by as many diseases lying in wait in every dish to pour forth vengance on their destroyers. Our riches and honours are acquired by laborious or perilous occupations, and our sports are pursued with scarce less fatigue or danger, and usually attended with distresses and destruction of innocent animals. This universal connection of pain with pleasure seems, I think, strongly to intimate, that pain abstractedly considered must have its uses; and since we may be assured, that it is never admitted but with the reluctance of the supreme author, those uses must be of the highest importance, though we have no faculties to conceive them. [To be continned, see page 161.] MORALITY OF MAHOMETANISM. [Continued from page 97.] Mahomet appears to have been a zealous asserter of the unity of Deity; taking frequent occasion throughout the Koran to insist on it as the fundamental point of religion, and to denounce severe vengeance against those who associate other names or relations with God. If it may be pardonable to indulge a little in conjecture, it may not appear perhaps the most absurd that has been hazarded, when we reflect how extensive the spread of Mahometanism has been, if we attribute somewhat of that reformation from Romish idolatry, the seeds of which continued taking root, long before they were cultivated for political purposes, to the indirect influence of the doctrine of the unity of the great God of the universe, who is truly the pure object of eastern adoration. While the Christian world were daily worshipping and eating their substance of a cake; while they were their rational powers on scholastic absurdity; the Asiatics adored a God whom they were taught by the Koran to conceive in these terms-" God! there is no God but he; the living, the self-subsisting; neither slumber nor sleep seizeth him; to him belongeth whatsoever is in heaven and on earth. Who is he that can intercede with him, but through his good pleasure? He knoweth that which is past, and that which is to come to them, and they shall not comprehend any thing of his knowledge, but so far as he pleaseth. His throne is extended over heaven and earth, and the preservation of both is no burthen unto him. He is the high, the mighty." These are expressions which must strike with their sublimity, even the enemies of the Arabian apostle that dictated them. God in the form and debasing and wasting subtilities, founded in Were it necessary to enter into a comparison between the Mahometan system and Popery, a thinking man would not |