hen death overtakes me, it is enough if I can
stretch out my hands to God, and say, 'The opportunities which
thou hast given me of comprehending and following thy government,
I have not neglected. I thank thee that thou hast brought me into
being. I am satisfied with the time I have enjoyed the things thou
hast given me. Receive them again, and assign them to whatever
place thou wilt.'" 12 Surely the pious heathen here speaks more
worthily than the presumptuous Christian! How much fitter would it
be, granting that death is the end all, to revise our interpretation,
look at the subject from the stand point of universal order,
not from this opinionative narrowness, and see if it be not
susceptible of a benignant meaning, worthy of grateful acceptance
by the humble mind of piety and the dispassionate spirit of science!
Yea, let God and his providence stand justified, though man prove
to have been egregiously mistaken.

"Though He smite me, yet will I praise Him; though He slay me, yet
will I trust in Him."

To return into the state we were in before we were created is not
to suffer any evil: it is to be absolutely free from all evil. It
is but the more perfect playing of that part, of which every sound
sleep is a rehearsal. The thought of it is mournful to the
enjoying soul, but not terrific; and even the mournfulness ceases
in the realization. He uttered a piece of cruel madness who said,
"Hell is more bearable than nothingness." Is it worse to have
nothing than it is to have infinite torture? Milton asks,

"For who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual
being?"

Every creature that exists, if full of pain, would snatch at the
boon of ceasing to be. To be blessed is a good; to be wretched is
an evil; not to be is neither a good nor an evil, but simply

12 Dissert., lib. iv. cap. x. sect. 2.

nothing. If such be our necessary fate, let us accept it with a
harmonized mind, not entertaining fear nor yielding to sadness.
Why should we shudder or grieve? Every time we slumber, we try on
the dress which, when we die, we shall wear easily forever.

Not satisfied to let the result rest in this somewhat sad but
peaceful aspect, it is quite customary to give it a turn and hue
of ghastly horribleness, by casting over it the dyspeptic dreams,
injecting it with the lurid lights and shades, of a morbid and
wilful fancy. The most loathsome and inexcusable instance in point
is the "Vision of Annihilation" depicted