ere want.

Thus my fear banished all my religious hope. All that former
confidence in God, which was founded upon such wonderful experience as
I had had of His goodness, now vanished, as if He that had fed me by
miracle hitherto could not preserve, by His power, the provision which
He had made for me by His goodness. I reproached myself with my
easiness, that would not sow any more corn one year than would just
serve me till the next season, as if no accident could intervene to
prevent my enjoying the crop that was upon the ground. And this I
thought so just a reproof that I resolved for the future to have two
or three years' corn beforehand, so that, whatever might come, I might
not perish for want of bread.

How strange a chequer work of Providence is the life of man! and by
what secret differing springs are the affections hurried about as
differing circumstances present! To-day we love what to-morrow we
hate; to-day we seek what to-morrow we shun; to-day we desire what
to-morrow we fear; nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of. This was
exemplified in me, at this time, in the most lively manner imaginable;
for I, whose only affliction was that I seemed banished from human
society, that I was alone, circumscribed by the boundless ocean, cut
off from mankind, and condemned to what I called silent life; that I
was as one whom Heaven thought not worthy to be numbered among the
living, or to appear among the rest of His creatures; that to have
seen one of my own species would have seemed to me a raising me from
death to life, and the greatest blessing that Heaven itself, next to
the supreme blessing of salvation, could bestow; I say, that I should
now tremble at the very apprehensions of seeing a man, and was ready
to sink into the ground at but the shadow or silent appearance of a
man's having set his foot in the island!

Such is the uneven state of human life; and it afforded me a great
many curious speculations afterwards, when I had a little recovered my
first surprise. I considered that this was the station of life the
infinitely wise and good providence of God had determined for me;
that, as I could not foresee what the ends of Divine wisdom might be
in all this, so I was not to dispute His sovereignty, who, as I was
His creature, had an undoubted right, by creation, to govern and
dispose of me absolutely as He thought fit, and who, as I was a
creature who had offended Him, had likewise a judicial right to
con