Reflect, reader upon this extract. The reasoning is neither fantastic, nor far-fetched; but it will probably be as new to you as it was to me, when I met with it in Mr. How's Devout Meditations. The republication of that book is one of those good works for which this country is beholden to the late excellent Bishop Jebb. Mr. Hetherington in his very original and able treatise upon the Fullness of Time, has seen this subject in the same point of view. He says “Even our three-score and ten years, broken and uncertain as that little span is, can delude us into the folly of putting death and its dread reckoning far from us, as if we were never to die, and might therefore neglect any preparation for the after judgement. But if we were to see before us the prospect of a life of one thousand years, we should doubtless regard death as a bug-bear indeed, and throw off all the salutary restraint which the fear of it now exercises. Suppose our tendencies to every kind of sinful indulgence as strong as at present, with the prospect of such lengthened enjoyment and immunity from danger, and we may easily imagine with what hundred-fold eagerness we should plunge into all kinds of enormity, and revel in the wildest licentiousness. But this is the very consummation to which the race of Adam had reached, when ‘God looked on the earth, and behold it was corrupt and filled with violence;’ and God determined to destroy the earth with its inhabitants.” A remark of Brantome's may be quoted as the curious confirmation of a pious man's opinion by a thoroughly corrupt one. It occurs in his Discourse upon the Emperor Charles the fifth. “_Il faut certes confesser,_” he says, “_comme j'ouy dire une fois à un vieux Capitaine Espagnol, que si ce grand Empereur eust été immortel, ou seulement de cent ans bien sain et dispos, il auroit esté par guerre le vray Fleau du Monde, tant il estoit frappé d'ambition, si jamais Empereur le fut._” CHAPTER CXXXIII. MORE THOUGHTS CONCERNING LIFE, DEATH AND IMMORTALITY. _Clericus es? legito hæc. Laicus? legito ista libenter. Crede mihi, invenies hic quod uterque voles._ D. DU-TR. MED. If we look to the better part of the human race as well as the worse, with regard to them also the ordinary term of human life will be found the best that could have been appointed both for themselves and for the purposes of society, the wisdom and the goodness of the ways of Providence becoming evident in this, as in all other things upon which our limited faculties are capable of forming a comprehensive judgement.