Yet more, there is reason in moralities, that the soul must live; If God be king in heaven, or have care for earth. Can wickedness have triumphed with impunity, or virtue toiled unseen? Shall cruelty torture unavenged, and the innocent complain unheard? Is there no recompense for woe, must there be no other world for justice,-- No hope in setting suns of good, nor terror for the evil at its zenith? How shall ye make answer unto this; a just God prospering iniquity, Wisdom encouraging the foolish, and goodness abetting the depraved! Yet again; mine erring brother, pardon this abundance of my speech, Yield me thy candour and thy charity, listening with a welcome: For, even now, a thousand thoughts are trooping to my theme; O mighty theme, O feeble thoughts! Alas! who is sufficient? Judge not so high a cause by these poor words alone, For lo, the advocate hath little skill: pardon and pass on: Certify thyself with surer proofs; fledge thine own mind for flight; Think, and pray; those better proofs shall follow on with holy aspiration. Yet in my humbler grade to help thy weal and comfort, Thy weal for this and higher worlds, and comfort in thy sickness, Suffer the multitude of fancies, walking with me still in love; But tread in fear, it is holy ground,--remember, Immortality! Wilt thou argue from infirmities, thine abject evil state, As how should stricken wretched man indeed exist for ever: The brutal and besotted, the savage and the slave, the sucking infant and the idiot, The mass of mean and common minds, and all to be immortal?-- Consider every beginning, how small it is and feeble: Ganges, and the rolling Mississippi sprung of brooks among the mountains; The Yew-tree of a thousand years was once a little seed, And Nero's marble Rome, a shepherd's mud-built hovel: A speck is on the tropic sky, and it groweth to the terrible tornado; An apple, all too fair to see, destroyed a world of souls: A tender babe is born,--it is Attila, scourge of the nations! A seeming malefactor dieth,--it is Jesus, the Saviour of men! And hive not in thy thoughts the vain and wordy notion That nothing which was born in Time can tire out the footsteps of Infinity: Reckon up a sum in numbers; where shall progression stop? The starting-post is definite and fixed, but what is the goal of numeration? So, begin upon a moment, and when shall being end? Souls emanate from God, to travel with Him equally for ever. Moreover, thou that objectest the unenterable circle of eternity, That none but He from everlasting can endure, as to a future everlasting, Consider, may it be impossible that creatures were counted in their Maker, And so, that the confines of Eternity are filled by God alone? Trust not thy soul upon a fancy: who would freight a bubble with a diamond, And launch that priceless gem on the boiling rapids of a cataract?