to popular opinions and popular language, with justice, and prosecuted with success, is a most awful calamity; it generally finds men sinners, or makes them such; for, so great is usually the disproportion between the provocation and the punishment, between the evil inflicted or suffered, and the good obtained, or even proposed, that a serious man cannot reconcile the very frequent rise, and the very long continuance of hostilities, to reason or to humanity. Upon whom, too, do the severities of war fall most heavily? In many cases they by whom contention is begun, or cherished, feel their influence extended, their dependents multiplied, and their wealth, in the regular and fair course of public business,

increased. While fields are laid waste and cities depopulated, the persons by whose commands such miseries take place are often wantoning in luxurious excess, or slumbering in a state of unfeeling and lazy repose. The peaceful citizen is in the meantime crushed under the weight of exactions, to which, for "conscience sake," he submits; the industrious merchant is impoverished by unforeseen and undeserved losses; and the artless husbandman is dragged away from those who are nearest and dearest to him, in order to shed the blood of beings as innocent and as wretched as himself, to repel injuries which he never felt or suspected, and to procure advantages which he may never understand or enjoy. Such are the aggravating circumstances belonging to war when it is carried on against a foreign enemy, even though it be disarmed of many terrors which accompanied it in less enlightened and less civilized ages. Dr. Parr.

754.

Under the natural order of things, the unfolding of an intelligent, self-helping character, must

keep pace with the amelioration of physical circumstances, the advance of the one with the exertions put forth to achieve the other; so that in establishing arrangements conducive to robustness of body, robustness of mind must be insensibly acquired. Contrariwise, to whatever extent activity of thought and firmness of purpose are made less needful by an artificial performance of their work, to that same extent must their increase, and the dependent social improvements, be retarded. The difference between English energy and Continental helplessness is due solely to difference of discipline. Having been left in a greater degree than others to manage their own affairs, the English people have become selfhelping, and have acquired great practical ability; whilst, conversely, the comparative helplessness of the paternally-governed nations of Europe is a natural result of the State-superintending policy or the reaction attendant on the action of official mechanisms.-Social Statics.

755.

Few are sufficiently aware how much reason most of us have, even as common moral livers, to thank God for being Englishmen. It would furnish grounds both for humility towards Providence and for increased attachment to

country, if each individual could but see and feel how large a part of his innocence he owes to his birth, breeding, and residence in Great Britain. The administration of the laws; the almost continual preaching of moral prudence; the number and respectability of our sects; the pressure of our ranks on each other, with the consequent reserve and watchfulness of demeanour in the superior ranks, and the emulation in the subordinate; the vast depth, expansion and systematic movements of our trade; and the consequent

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inter-dependence, the arterial or nerve-like network of property, which make every deviation from outward integrity a calculable loss to the offending individual from its mere effects, as obstruction and irregularity; and lastly, the naturalness of doing as others do. These and the like influences, peculiar, some in the kind and all in the degree, to this privileged island, are the buttresses on which our foundationless well-doing is upheld even as a house of cards, the architecture of our infancy, in which each is supported by all. -S. T. Coleridge.

756.

Let us use sometimes to stop a little and ask ourselves what we are about? whither we are going? and where all will end at last ?—

757.

The sooner thou preparest to die, the sooner thou wilt be delivered from the fears of death. And then the hopes of a better life will carry thee cheerfully through this world, whatever storms thou meetest with.

758.

Some men talk of preparing for death as if it were a thing that could be done in two or three days; and that the proper time of doing it were a little before they die; but I know no other preparation for death but living well; and thus we shall be well prepared when death comes.-

759.

A good man who has taken care all his life to please God, has little more to do when he sees death approaching than to take leave of his friends; to bless his children, to support and comfort himself with the hopes of immortal life and a glorious resurrection, and to resign up his spirit into the hands of God and his Saviour.

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