17. I intreat you to reflect, whether there are not other inhabitants in your breast, which leave no room for happiness there. May you not discover, through a thousand disguises, pride? Too high an opinion of yourself? Vanity, thirst of praise, even (who would believe it?) of the applause of knaves and fools? Unevenness or sourness of temper? Proneness to anger or revenge? Peevishness, fretfulness, or pining discontent? Nay, perhaps even covetousness.――And did you ever think, happiness could dwell with these? Awake out of that senseless dream. Think not of reconciling things incompatible. All these tempers are essential misery. So long as any of these are harboured in your breast, you must be a stranger to inward peace. What avails it you, if there be no other hell? Whenever these fiends are let loose upon you, you will be constrained to own,
“Hell is where’er I am: myself am hell;”
And can the supreme Being love those tempers, which you yourself abhor in all but yourself? If not, they imply guilt as well as misery. Doubtless they do. Only enquire of your own heart. How often in the mid career of your vice have you felt a secret reproof, which you knew not how to bear, and therefore stifled as soon as possible?
18. And did not even _this_ point at an hereafter? A future state of existence? The more reasonable among you have no doubt of this; you do not imagine the whole man dies together: although you hardly suppose the soul, once disengaged, will dwell again in an house of clay. But how will your soul subsist without it? How are _you_ qualified for a separate state? Suppose this earthly covering, this vehicle of organized matter, whereby you hold commerce with the material world, were now to drop off! Now, what would you do in the regions of immortality? You cannot eat or drink there. You cannot indulge either the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eye, or the pride of life. You love only worldly things; and they are gone, fled as smoke, driven away for ever. Here is no possibility of sensual enjoyments; and you have a rellish for nothing else. O what a separation is this, from all that you hold dear! What a breach is made, never to be healed!
But beside this, you are unholy: full of evil tempers: for you did not put off these with the body. You did not leave pride, revenge, malice, envy, discontent behind you, when you left the world. And now you are no longer cheared by the light of the sun, nor diverted by the flux of various objects: but those dogs of hell are let loose to prey upon your soul, with their whole, unrebated strength. Nor is there any hope, that your spirit will now ever be restored to its original purity; not even that poor hope of a purging fire, so elegantly described by the _Heathen_ poet some ages before the notion was revived among the doctrines of the _Romish_ church
――Aliæ tenduntur inanes Suspensæ ad ventos; aliis sub gurgite vasto Infectum eluitur scelus, aut exuritur igni―― Donec longa dies, exacto temporis orbe, Concretam exemit labem, purumque reliquit Æthereum sensum atque aurai simplicis ignem.
19. What a great gulph then is fixed between you and happiness, both in this world and that which is to come? Well may you shudder at the thought! More especially when you are about to enter on that untried state of existence. For what a prospect is this, when you stand on the verge of life, ready to launch out into eternity? What can you then think? You see nothing before you. All is dark and dreary. On the very best supposition, how well may you address your parting soul in the words of dying _Adrian_:
“Poor, little, pretty, fluttering thing, Must we no longer live together? And dost thou prune thy trembling wing, To take thy flight thou know’st not whither?
Thy pleasing vein, thy hum’rous folly Is all neglected, all forgot; And pensive, wavering, melancholy, Thou hop’st, and fear’st thou know’st not what.”
“Thou know’st not what!” Here is the sting, suppose there were no other. To be _thou knowest not what_? * Not for a month, or year, but thro’ the countless ages of eternity! What a tormenting uncertainty must this be? What racking unwillingness must it occasion, to exchange even this known vale of tears, for the unknown valley of the shadow of death?
“And is there no cure for this?” Indeed there is an effectual cure; even the knowledge and love of God. There is a knowledge of God which _unveils_ eternity, and a love of God which _endears_ it. That knowledge makes the great abyss _visible_; and _uncertainty_ vanishes away. That love makes it _amiable_ to the soul, so that _fear_ has no more place! But the moment God says, by the welcome angel of death, “Come thou up hither!” She
“Claps the glad wing and towers away, And mingles with the blaze of day.”