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thus fruftrate their own designs by the SERM. very means they make use of to promote them?

1

But things are apt to dazzle at a diftance, or to deceive us when nigh, through a falfe glafs, which, when brought close and examined, lose their form, and become a dead mass without colour or beauty.

Riches are often but a kind of wandering fire, that leads us aftray into the paths of vice and folly; and power given to the weak, or to the wicked, is but as a sword in the hands of a madman, which for a while throws terror and deftruction round about, and then is point

ed against the breast of him that wears it.

Again, if we turn our eyes towards the candidates for glory and empire

VOL. III.

D

among

SER M. among the great, what poor and unfa

II.

tisfactory pleasures, what mean and triAling rewards does ambition bestow upon her votaries! Care encircles her crowns, and terror haunts her palaces; her feasts are poisoned with fear, and her triumphs checked by confcience, and we cry out with the wife man, furely this is vanity of vanities, all is vanity.

But furely, fay fome, there are perfections, there are fome real and folid pre-eminences in human nature, which cannot but be the reasonable object of our wishes, the commendable and proper fubject of our prayers; children, health, long life, reputation, and knowledge, bid fair for this character. But even thefe, I fear, without proper reftrictions, will upon a closer inspection, and stript of the gaudy drefs our fancies are pleased to beftow on them, appear

by

by no means fo defirable as we were at SERM.

II.

firft inclined to think them.

Children and the fruit of the womb are a bleffing; they are like the arrows in the hand of the giant, fays the Pfalmist; happy is he that hath his quiver full of them; but alas! what bitter waters have flowed even from this fountain of delight! What if duty and affection change to perverseness and disobedience; what if these arrows turn against our own breafts? Then where is the father's envied happiness; where are all his dream's of promised pleasure, when those who fhould fupport his age, and bring honour to his name, difgrace his family, wound his fair reputation, and bring his grey hairs in forrow to the grave ?

But are not health and long life to be defired? are these also among the things

D 2

SERM. things we should not ask? are they not

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the fource of every pleasure, and productive of every happiness? Health, though the offspring of exercise and fobriety, may become the mother of floth and intemperance; it may indeed aid and strengthen virtue, but it may likewife heighten and enflame our paffions, and lead us into the paths of vice. And on the other hand, if it shall please God in his mercy to chastise us, to lend his gracious hand to ftop us in our career of folly and wickednefs, fickness may be the greatest bleffing he can beftow upon us. Experience convinces us, that men are much more likely to mend by feeling what they are, than by being told what they ought to be. When the king of terrors, therefore, is approaching towards us, fickness is fent to prepare the way before him, to fubdue our paffions, to wean our affections from the world,

to

II.

to give us time for reflection and re- SER M. pentance, that we may not drop into eternity with all our imperfections on our heads, but flide into the grave with a more eafy and infenfible motion, and calmly refign our life into the hands of him that gave it.

The love of life itself is indeed fo ftrictly united to our nature, fo interwoven as it were with our very frame and conftitution, that the defire of prolonging it is, we must own, by no means to be wondered at; and yet the folly of mankind is not perhaps in any thing more confpicuous than in their extreme tenaciousness of it. Length of days may be far from a bleffing to the beft of us: the beauty of the circle doth not confift fo much in the fize, as in the completeness of it; and the smallest parts of nature shew as much harmony in themselves,