praise-worthiness and blame-worthiness, he seems to act suitably to
his divine extraction: but when he suffers himself to be astonished
and confounded by the judgments of ignorant and weak man, he discovers
his connexion with mortality, and appears to act suitably, rather to
the human, than to the divine, part of his origin.
In such cases, the only effectual consolation of humbled and afflicted
man lies in an appeal to a still higher tribunal, to that of the
all-seeing Judge of the world, whose eye can never be deceived, and
whose judgments can never be perverted. A firm confidence in the
unerring rectitude of this great tribunal, before which his innocence
is in due time to be declared, and his virtue to be finally rewarded,
can alone support him under the weakness and despondency of his own
mind, under the perturbation and astonishment of the man within the
breast, whom nature has set up as, in this life, the great guardian,
not only of his innocence, but of his tranquillity. Our happiness in
this life is thus, upon many occasions, dependent upon the humble hope
and expectation of a life to come: a hope and expectation deeply
rooted in human nature; which can alone support its lofty ideas of its
own dignity; can alone illumine the dreary prospect of its continually
approaching mortality, and maintain its cheerfulness under all the
heaviest calamities to which, from the disorders of this life, it may
sometimes be exposed. That there is a world to come, where exact
justice will be done to every man, where every man will be ranked with
those who, in the moral and intellectual qualities, are really his
equals; where the owner of those humble talents and virtues which,
from being depressed by fortunes, had, in this life, no opportunity of
displaying themselves; which were unknown, not only to the public, but
which he himself could scarce be sure that he possessed, and for which
even the man within the breast could scarce venture to afford him any
distinct and clear testimony; where that modest, silent, and unknown
merit, will be placed upon a level, and sometimes above those who, in
this world, had enjoyed the highest reputation, and who, from the
advantage of their situation, had been enabled to perform the most
splendid and dazzling actions; is a doctrine, in every respect so
venerable, so comfortable to the weakness, so flattering to the
grandeur of human nature, that the virtuous man who has the misfortune
to doubt of it, cannot possibly avoid wishing most earnestly and
anxiously to believe it. It could never have been exposed to the
derision of the scoffer, had not the distribution of rewards and
punishments, which some of its most zealous assertors have taught us
was to be made in that world to come, been too frequently in direct
opposition to all our moral sentiments.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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