nd on the other hand, that though
we unavoidably have miseries here, life is short, and they will soon be
over. Thus do these consolations destroy each other; for if life is a
place of comfort, its shortness must be misery, and if it be long, our
griefs are protracted. Thus philosophy is weak; but religion comforts
in an higher strain. Man is here, it tells us, fitting up his mind, and
preparing it for another abode. When the good man leaves the body and is
all a glorious mind, he will find he has been making himself a heaven of
happiness here, while the wretch that has been maimed and contaminated
by his vices, shrinks from his body with terror, and finds that he has
anticipated the vengeance of heaven. To religion then we must hold in
every circumstance of life for our truest comfort; for if already we
are happy, it is a pleasure to think that we can make that happiness
unending, and if we are miserable, it is very consoling to think that
there is a place of rest. Thus to the fortunate religion holds out a
continuance of bliss, to the wretched a change from pain.

But though religion is very kind to all men, it has promised peculiar
rewards to the unhappy; the sick, the naked, the houseless, the
heavy-laden, and the prisoner, have ever most frequent promises in our
sacred law. The author of our religion every where professes himself the
wretch's friend, and unlike the false ones of this world, bestows all
his caresses upon the forlorn. The unthinking have censured this as
partiality, as a preference without merit to deserve it. But they never
reflect that it is not in the power even of heaven itself to make the
offer of unceasing felicity as great a gift to the happy as to the
miserable. To the first eternity is but a single blessing, since at most
it but encreases what they already possess. To the latter it is a double
advantage; for it diminishes their pain here, and rewards them with
heavenly bliss hereafter.

But providence is in another respect kinder to the poor than the rich;
for as it thus makes the life after death more desirable, so it smooths
the passage there. The wretched have had a long familiarity with every
face of terror. The man of sorrow lays himself quietly down, without
possessions to regret, and but few ties to stop his departure: he feels
only nature's pang in the final separation, and this is no way greater
than he has often fainted under before; for after a certain degree of
pain, every new b