These considerations are not affected by the question of the distribution of happiness. Rewards and punishments might be meted out with an even hand, and this life singly would still be quite incompetent to fulfil the conditions of man's nature. But the pretext of Bolingbroke is itself unfounded, and he yielded to the exigencies of his infidelity when he maintained that the world had never furnished examples of unequal happiness which could call for future redress. Pope's efforts to prove the paradox are a continuous series of contradictions, sophistries, and misstatements. "Virtue alone," he says, "is happiness below," and "God intends happiness to be equal."[892] It follows, from these premises, that Pope did not mean that all the world were equally happy. Happiness he holds to be proportioned to virtue; the best men are the richest in earthly felicity. The supposition is repugnant to innumerable appearances, and Pope endeavoured to evade them by contending that happiness is not placed in "externals."[893] "Virtue's prize," he says, "is the soul's calm sunshine which nothing can destroy;" and he justly calls men "weak and foolish" who imagine that a better reward would be "a crown, a coach-and-six, a conqueror's sword," or the gown which is the badge of official dignity.[894] The fallacy is upon the surface. "The soul's calm sunshine" may mean peace of conscience or complete felicity. In the first sense it cannot be "destroyed" by physical torture; in the second sense, physical torture overclouds the "sunshine" and disturbs the "calm." It is vain to pretend that a virtuous man upon the rack has the same amount of mental ease as when he is in bodily comfort. "Externals" are one element in human happiness, or the worst persecutions which have desolated the world could not have occasioned the smallest exceptional sufferings to the good. "If pain," says Mackintosh, "were not an evil, cruelty would not be a vice."[895] Pope, in his luxurious retirement at Twickenham, might exclaim, "Condition, circumstance, is not the thing."[896] He would have thought differently if he had been the slave of a brutal master, or had been immured in one of the dungeons called "little-ease," where a prisoner of stout frame and sturdy principles was sometimes maimed in the process of squeezing him into a space too small for his coffin.