untry very
eminent service.

By these dark dispensations of Providence, one is
almost led to inquire why the useful, the
generous, the spirited patriot is cut off in the
morning of his days, while the base betrayer of
his country, the incendiary, who blows up the
flames of civil discord to gratify his own mad
ambition, and sports with the miseries of
millions, is suffered to grow gray in iniquity.

But who shall say to the Great Arbiter of life and
death, to the righteous Sovereign of the Universe,
why hast thou done thus?

Not surely man, whose ideas are so circumscribed,
and whose understanding can grasp so little of the
Divine government, that we are lost at the
threshold, and stand astonished at the displays of
Almighty power and wisdom. But shall we not rely
on Infinite goodness, however severe may be our
chastisement, while in this militant state, not
doubting that, when the ball of Time is wound up,
and the final adjustment of the wise economy of
the universe takes place, virtue, whether public
or private, will be crowned with the plaudits of
the best of beings; while the vicious man, immured
in his cot, or the public plunderer of nations,
who riots on the spoils of the oppressed and
tramples on the rights of man, will reap the
reward of his guilty deeds?

The painful anxiety expressed in your last letter
for the complicated distresses of the inhabitants
of Boston, is experienced, in a greater or less
degree, by every heart which knows anything of the
feelings of humanity. But He who is higher than
the highest, and "seeth when there is oppression
in the city," I trust will deliver us. He has
already made a way for the escape of many, and if
speedy vengeance does not soon overtake the
wretched authors of their calamities, we must
consider them as the scourge of God, designed for
the correction of a favored people, who have been
too unmindful of his goodness; and when they shall
be aroused by affliction to a sense of virtue,
which stimulated their worthy progenitors to brave