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, and, like those of the year, afford 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 chase: 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 divers