3. Reason, calmly surveying the case of the dying person himself, sees many alleviations, of which imagination, sketching under the influence of the dread of death, takes no account. He finds himself, in this new predicament, the absorbing object of all interests and all solicitude and affection. It is not in human nature, that this should not call up complacent emotions and slumbering affections from their secret cells. The subsequent progress towards the last moment brings an imperceptibly increasing insensibility, manifested by drowsiness and sleep. Of those, who preserve the exercise of their faculties entire to the last, many instances are recorded of persons, who had shown the most unmanly dread of death in their health, that have met dissolution with the calmness of perfect self-possession. Of the rest, the greater number die with little more apparent pain and struggle, than accompany the act of sleeping. The greater freshness, vigor and nervous irritability of young people and children cause that most of the exceptions are of this description. In a great number of cases, which I have witnessed, I have paused in doubt, whether the person had yielded his last sigh, or not, after he had actually deceased. To soften the last infliction, nature almost invariably veils it under a low delirium, or absolute unconsciousness. 4. It is impossible to imagine a more obvious and unquestionable principle of philosophy, than that every reasoning faculty of our nature must declare to us, loudly and unequivocally, and with an influence as strong as reason can command, that it is wisdom, nay, the dictate of the least portion of common sense, to dread, to resist, to repine, to groan, as little as possible, in view of an endurance absolutely inevitable. If it be hard to sustain when met with a fearless, resigned and unmurmuring spirit, it must certainly be still harder, when we are obliged to bend our necks to it with the excruciating addition of shrinking fear, dreadful anticipation and ineffectual struggles to evade it, and with murmurs and groans, at finding the inutility of these efforts. Innumerable examples prove to us, that nature has kindly endowed us with reason and mental vigor to such an extent, that, under the influence of right motive and training, no possible form of suffering can be presented, over which this power may not manifest, and has not manifested a complete triumph.