The insecurity which keeps virtue vigilant and faithful, the hardy discipline which draws out ennobling energies, and corrects baser properties, would be turned to carelessness and corruption. The interests of the virtuous will not permit that they should be constant and conspicuous exceptions to the common lot. But the "ills and accidents" never strike at random. The human race is not with the Deity an abstract conception. He beholds every creature in its individuality, and shields and chastens each by the rules of a wisdom which can never be suspended. The idea we frame of his attributes negatives the hypothesis of Pope. God cannot fail to establish a harmony between physical laws, and the dispensation which befits each particular man. In admitting that calamities befall mankind without reference to virtue and vice, Pope was drawn into statements which completely upset his principle that happiness is always proportioned to desert. He asks if virtue "made Digby, the son, expire, why his father lives full of days and honour?"[910] He might be asked in turn, why, if good men in this life have an equal share of happiness, the father should have lived fifty years longer than the son? For happiness to be equal there must be an equality of duration as well as of degree. He grants that "virtue sometimes starves," and thinks it enough to answer, in the face of historical facts, that virtue does not occasion the destitution. "Bread," he says, "is the price of toil, not of virtue, and the good man may be weak, be indolent."[911] Indolence is a vice, and irrelevant to the discussion. The weakness may be a misfortune, and Lazarus is not less deserving because he is covered with sores. Or the "good man" may be neither "indolent" nor "weak," and yet be starved, which happened to thousands of protestants who were driven from their homes and employments by the callous bigotry of Louis XIV. Whatever the cause of the starvation, the balance of happiness is disturbed, and Pope, to mask the flaw in his argument, added that the "claim" of starving virtue was not "to plenty, but content."[912] Now contentment is of two kinds. There is a contentment of happiness which is incompatible with excessive suffering, and a contentment of resignation which acquiesces in the severest dispensations of Providence. St. Paul said in the latter sense, "I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content,"[913] which does not prevent his speaking repeatedly of the afflictions he endured, or keep him from asserting that "no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous."[914] Of this type is the contentment of starving virtue,--a patient submission to trial, and not the contentment which is required to produce equality of happiness. Human nature has been denied the capacity for neutralising all degrees of anguish. Pope straightway slides off into the subterfuge that the craving for bread is "a demand for riches." He inveighs against the