The Religion of Nature Delineated William Wollaston (my reading book .TXT) 📖

the apparatus to an execution is to others; and a word may be more terrible and sensible to tender natures, than a sword is to the senseless or intrepid breed. The same may be said with respect to enjoyments: men have different tastes, and the use of the same things does not beget equal pleasure in all. Besides, we scarce ever know the whole case. We do not see the inward stings and secret pains which many of those men carry about them, whose external splendor and flourishing estate is so much admired by beholders,284 nor perhaps sufficiently consider the silent pleasures of a lower fortune, arising from temperance, moderate desires, easy reflections, a consciousness of knowledge and truth, with other pleasures of the mind, much greater many times than those of the body.285 Before one can pronounce another happy or otherwise, he should know all the other’s enjoyments and all his sufferings.286 Many misfortunes are compensated287 by some larger endowments, or extraordinary felicities in other respects. But suppose the pleasures of some, and the sufferings of some others, to be just as they appear: still we know not the consequences of them.288 The pleasures of those men may lead to miseries greater than those of the latter, and be in reality the greater misfortune; and, again, the sufferings of these may be preludes to succeeding advantages.289 So that, indeed, we know not how to name these outward appearances of particular men, nor which to call happiness, which the contrary, unless we knew the inward sense of the persons themselves, all their true circumstances, and what will be hereafter consequent upon their present success or adversity.

Men ought to be considered as members of families, nations, mankind, the universe, from which they cannot be separated; and then from the very condition of their being it will appear that there must be great inequalities:290 that the innocent cannot but be sometimes involved in general calamities or punishments, nor the guilty but share in public prosperities,291 and that the good of the whole society or kind is to be regarded preferably to the present pleasure of any individual, if they happen to clash.292

Lastly, if the virtuous man has undergone more, in this life, than it would be reasonable he should suffer, if there was no other, yet those sufferings may not be unreasonable if there is another. For they may be made up to him by such enjoyments as it would be reasonable for him to prefer, even with those previous mortifications, before the pleasures of this life with the loss of them. And moreover, sometimes the only way to the felicities of a better state may lie through dark and difficult passes, discipline to some men being necessary to bring them to reflect, and to force them into such methods as may produce in them proper improvements, such as otherwise and of themselves they would never have fallen into. On the other side, if vicious and wicked men do prosper and make a figure, yet it is possible their sufferings hereafter may be such as that the excess of them above their past enjoyments may be equal to the just mulct of their villanies and wickedness. And further, their worldly pleasures (which must be supposed to be such as are not philosophical, or moderated and governed by reason and habits of virtue) being apt to fill the mind, and engross the whole man, and by that means to exclude almost all right reflections, with the proper applications of them, may be the very causes of their ruin, while they leave them under such defects at the end of their days, as we shall see afterward tend to unhappiness.

If what is objected be in many instances true, this only infers the necessity of a future state: that is, if good and bad men are not respectively treated according to reason in this life, they may yet be so treated if this and another to follow be taken together into the account.293 And perhaps it is (as I have been always apt to think) in order to convince us of the certainty of a future state, that instances of that kind have been so numerous. For he must not only be guilty of blasphemy, but reduced to the greatest absurdity, who, rather than he will own there is such a state, is forced to make God an unreasonable Being:294 which I think amounts to a strong demonstration that there is one. But of that, more hereafter.

XIX. If we would behave ourselves as being what we cannot but be sensible we are, towards God as being what He is according to the foregoing propositions; or, if we would endeavor to behave ourselves towards him according to truth, we must observe these following and the like particulars:

We must not pretend to represent Him by any picture or image whatsoever.295 Because this is flatly to deny his incorporeity, incomprehensible nature, etc.296

We ought to be so far from doing this, that even the language we use when we speak of Him, and especially of his positive nature and essential properties, ought not only to be chosen with the utmost care, but also to be understood in the sublimest sense; and the same is true with respect to our thoughts, mutatis mutandis.297 Or, thus: we must endeavor to think and speak of Him in the most reverent terms and most proper manner we are able;298 keeping withal this general conclusion and, as it were, habitual reflection in our minds: that, though we do the best we can, He is still something above all our conceptions; and desiring that our faint expressions may be taken as aiming at a higher and