life which
seems to our self-love so short, when we compare it with the ideas we
frame of eternity, or even with the duration of some other beings,
will appear sufficient, upon a less partial view, to all the ends of
the creation, and of a just proportion in the successive course of
generations. The term itself is long; we render it short; and the want
we complain of flows from our profusion, not from our poverty.

Let us leave the men of pleasure and of business, who are often
candid enough to own that they throw away their time, and thereby to
confess that they complain of the Supreme Being for no other reason
than this, that He has not proportioned His bounty to their
extravagance. Let us consider the scholar and philosopher, who, far
from owning that he throws any time away, reproves others for doing
it; that solemn mortal who abstains from the pleasures, and declines
the business of the world, that he may dedicate his whole time to the
search of truth and the improvement of knowledge. When such a one
complains of the shortness of human life in general, or of his
remaining share in particular, might not a man more reasonable, tho
less solemn, expostulate thus with him: "Your complaint is indeed
consistent with your practise; but you would not possibly renew your
complaint if you reviewed your practise. Tho reading makes a scholar,
yet every scholar is not a philosopher, nor every philosopher a wise
man. It cost you twenty years to devour all the volumes on one side of
your library; you came out a great critic in Latin and Greek, in the
Oriental tongues, in history and chronology; but you were not
satisfied. You confest that these were the _literae nihil sanantes_,
and you wanted more time to acquire other knowledge. You have had this
time; you have passed twenty years more on the other side of your
library, among philosophers, rabbis, commentators, school-men, and
whole legions of modern doctors. You are extremely well versed in all
that has been written concerning the nature of God, and of the soul of
man, about matter and form, body and spirit, and space and eternal
essences, and incorporeal substances, and the rest of those profound
speculations. You are a master of the controversies that have arisen
about nature and grace, about predestination and freewill, and all the
other abstruse questions that have made so much noise in the schools,
and done so much hurt in the world. You are going on, as fast as the
infir