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Death we shall omit from the present list, (for no man knows any evil of death but its fear,) and leave its qualities for future inference.

Before we seek any use, mitigation or compensation of our evils, we shall take leave to deprecate them.

How little is there of pain, compared with what the body may be fancied capable of suffering! How near we are to unconsciousness and death! The God of nature tunes our every string—he pumps the blood, he heaves the lungs, he keeps us altogether: and lo! with one little bone dislocated, we think God has deserted us!—with one little nerve in a tooth partially overflowed with blood, we think we smell hell fire, though all the rest of the system be working well. Yet all our teeth are capable of aching, and all our bones may be dislocated at once. God will not permit us to suffer so much; consciousness gives way,—we pass under the shadow of an angel's wing, and nature struggles for her liberty alone with God. Ah! to be God-forsaken — and reason still holding the throne of a soul whose body could not die—!—! if God meant to hurt us we should be hurt indeed.

And experience teaches us that there is a moral power in a well-wrought mind almost superior to all pain. The eye of the martyr, fixed on the throne of his divinity, will not see his quivering flesh. The heroes of Indian immolation,—the devotees who hang by hooks in their backs,—the wives who burn without a murmur on the pyres of their departed husbands,—the Montezuma smiling on his bed of roses,—what do these things tell us? There is God within us.

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