frequently neutral tranquillity. Those who attempt to reason us out of our follies begin at the wrong end, since the attempt naturally presupposes us capable of reason; but to be made capable of this is one great point of the cure. There are but few talents requisite to become a popular preacher; for the people are easily pleased, if they perceive any endeavours in the orator to please them: the meanest qualifications will work this effect, if the preacher sincerely sets about it. Perhaps little, indeed, very little more is required, than sincerity and assurance; and a becoming sincerity is always certain of producing a becoming assurance. "If you wish me to weep, you must first weep yourself”—is so trite a quotation, that it almost demands an apology to repeat it; yet, though all allow the justice of the remark, how few do we find put it in practice! Our pulpit orators, with the most faulty bashfulness, seem impressed rather with an awe of their audience than with a just respect for the truths they are about to deliver: they, of all professors, seem the most bashful, who have the greatest right to glory in their commission. GOLDSMITH. 49.-ON UNIVERSAL BENEVOLENCE. THOUGH our effectual good offices can very seldom be extended to any wider society than that of our own country, our good-will is circumscribed by no boundary, but may embrace the immensity of the universe. We cannot form the idea of any innocent and sensible being, whose happiness we should not desire, or to whose misery, when distinctly brought home to the imagination, we should not have some degree of aversion. The idea of a mischievous, though sensible being, indeed, naturally provokes our hatred; but the ill-will which, in this case, we bear to it, is really the effect of the sympathy which we feel with the misery and resentment of those other innocent and sensible beings, whose happiness is disturbed by its malice. This universal benevolence, how noble and generous soever, can be the source of no solid happiness to any man who is not thoroughly convinced that all the inhabitants of the universe, the meanest as well as the greatest, are under the immediate care and protection of that great, benevolent, and all-wise Being, who directs all the movements of nature; and who is determined, by his own unalterable perfections, to maintain in it, at all times, the greatest possible quantity of happiness. To this universal benevolence, on the contrary, the very suspicion of a fatherless world must be the most melancholy of all reflections; from the thought that all the unknown regions of infinite and incomprehensible space may be filled with nothing but endless misery and wretchedness. All the splendour of the highest prosperity can never enlighten the gloom with which so dreadful an idea must necessarily overshadow the imagination; nor, in a wise and virtuous man, can all the sorrow of the most afflicting adversity ever dry up the joy which necessarily springs from the habitual and thorough conviction of the truth of the contrary system. The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing, too, that the interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interests of the state or sovereignty, of which it is only a subordinate part. He should, therefore, be equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interests of the universe, to the interest of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings, of which God himself is the immediate administrator and director. If he is deeply impressed with the habitual and thorough conviction, that this benevolent and all-wise Being can admit into the system of his government no partial evil which is not necessary for the universal good, he must consider all the misfortunes which may befal himself, his friends, his society, or his country, as necessary for the prosperity of the universe, and therefore as what he ought, not only to submit to with resignation, but as what he himself, if he had known all the connexions and dependencies of things, ought sincerely and devoutly to have wished for. Nor does this magnanimous resignation to the will of the great Director of the universe seem in any respect beyond the reach of human nature. Good soldiers, who both love and trust their general, frequently march with more gaiety and alacrity to the forlorn station, from which they never expect to return, than they would to one where there was neither difficulty nor danger. In marching to the latter, they could feel no other sentiment than that of the dulness of ordinary duty; in marching to the former, they feel that they are making the noblest exertion which it is possible for man to make. They know that their general would not have ordered them upon this station, had it not been necessary for the safety of the army, for the success of the war. They cheerfully sacrifice their own little systems for the prosperity of a greater system. They take an affectionate leave of their comrades, to whom they wish all happiness and success; and march out, not only with submissive obedience, but often with shouts of the most joyful exultations, to that fatal, but splendid and honourable station to which they are appointed. No conductor of an army can deserve more unlimited trust, more ardent and zealous affection, than the great Conductor of the universe. In the greatest public as well as private disasters, a wise man ought to consider that he himself, his friends and countrymen, have only been ordered upon the forlorn station of the universe; that, had it not been necessary for the good of the whole, they would not have been so ordered; and that it is their duty, not only with humble resignation to submit to this allotment, but to endeavour to embrace it with alacrity and joy. A wise man should surely be capable of doing what a good soldier holds himself at all times in readiness to do. The idea of that Divine Being, whose benevolence, and wisdom have, from all eternity, contrived and conducted the immense machine of the universe, so as at all times to produce the greatest possible quantity of happiness, is certainly, of all the objects of human contemplation, by far the most sublime. Every other thought necessarily appears mean in the comparison. The man whom we believe to be principally occupied in this sublime contemplation, seldom fails to be the object of our highest veneration; and, though his life should be altogether contemplative, we often regard him with a sort of religious respect much superior to that with which we look upon the most active and useful servant of the commonwealth. The meditations of Marcus Antoninus, which turn principally upon this subject, have contributed more, perhaps, to the general admiration of his character, than all the different transactions of his just, merciful, and beneficent reign." The administration of the great system of the universe, however, the care of the universal happiness of all rational and sensible beings, is the business of God and not of man. To man is allotted a much humbler department, but one much more suitable to the weakness of his powers, and to the narrowness of his comprehension; the care of his own happiness, of that of his family, his friends, his country: that he is occupied in contemplating the more sublime, can never be an excuse for his neglecting the more humble department ; and he must not expose himself to the charge which Avidius Cassius is said to have brought, perhaps unjustly, against Marcus Antoninus, that while he employed himself in philosophical speculations, and contemplated the prosperity of the universe, he neglected that of the Roman empire. The most sublime speculation of the contemplative philosopher can scarce compensate the neglect of the smallest active duty. DR ADAM SMITH. 50.-ON THE ADVANTAGES OF A WELL-CULTIVATED MIND. IT is not without reason that those who have tasted the pleasures afforded by philosophy and literature have lavishied upon them the greatest eulogiums. The benefits they produce are too many to enumerate, valuable beyond estimation, and various as the scenes of human life. The man who has a knowledge of the works of God, in the creation of the universe, and his providential government of the immense system of the material and intellectual world, can never be without a copious fund of the most agreeable amusement. He can never be solitary; for in the most lonely solitude he is not destitute of company and conversation: his own ideas are his companions, and he can always converse with his own mind. How much soever a person may be engaged in pleasures, or encumbered with business, he will certainly have some moments to spare for thought and reflection. No one who has observed how heavy the vacuities of time hang upon minds unfurnished with images, and unaccustomed to think, will be at a loss to make a just estimate of the advantages of possessing a copious stock of ideas, of which the combinations may take a multiplicity of forms, and may be varied to infinity. Mental occupations are a pleasing relief from bodily exertions, and that perpetual hurry and wearisome attention, which, in most of the employments of life, must be given to objects which are no otherwise interesting than as they are necessary. The mind, in an hour of leisure, obtaining a short vacation from the perplexing cares of the world, finds, in its own contemplations, a source of amusement, of solace, and pleasure. The tiresome attention that must be given to an infinite number of things, which, singly and separately taken, are of little moment, but collectively con sidered, form an important aggregate, requires to be sometimes relaxed by thoughts and reflections of a more general and extensive nature, and directed to objects of which the examination may open a more spacious field of exercise to the mind, give scope to its exertions, expand its ideas, present new combinations, and exhibit to the intellectual eye, images new, various, sublime, or beautiful. The time of action will not always continue; the young ought ever to have this consideration present to their mind, that they must grow old, unless prematurely cut off by sickness or accident. They ought to contemplate the certain approach of age and decrepitude, and consider that all temporal happiness is of uncertain acquisition, mixed with a variety of alloy, and, in whatever degree attained, only of a short and precarious duration. Every day brings some disappointment, some diminution of pleasure, or some frustration of hope; and every moment brings us nearer to that period, when the present scenes shall recede from the view, and future prospects cannot be formed. This consideration displays, in a very interesting point of view, the beneficial effects of furnishing the mind with a stock of ideas that may amuse it in leisure, accompany it in solitude, dispel the gloom of melancholy, lighten the pressure of misfortune, dissipate the vexations arising from baffled projects or disappointed hopes, and relieve the tedium of that season of life where new acquisitions can no more be made, and the world can no longer flatter and delude us with its illusory hopes and promises. |