por and inaction or through a positive corrective discipline.* Now, both these methods are adopted. Sleep comes with its torpor; dreams with their relaxation, when the traces are unhitched, and the faculties are permitted to wander purposeless over the great commons of speculation; and reverie, where the same faculties are let loose with equal freedom from immediate restraint, but still in a specially assigned field. Then, as a disciplinary adjunct, comes pain, a part of whose purposes in this respect have already been noticed. Rest, in fact, seems to answer the purpose of recuperating the powers; pain, that of refining and invigorating them. The one may be compared to the sunlight and the dew when acting on the plant; the other to the skill of the gardener, which deepens the crimson of the rose, mottles its damask, and almost indefinitely multiplies its petals; which grafts on the hardy stock of the coarser stem the delicate stock of the weaker, and thus unites the strength of the one with the perfectness in quality of the other, until, from the hard and sour wild fruit, come the apple in its fullest and most golden luxuriance, and the peach in its richest and most luscious blush. If we look, in fact, at the finest developments of human genius, we shall find that they have been accompanied, in most instances, by some physical deformity or more than usual proportion of pain: Milton and Homer (if Pausanias be correct) by blindness; Scott and Byron by lameness; Chatham by gout.

§ 158. Even still more remarkable are the physiological alleviations of pain, some of which are thus strikingly ex

* See ante, 2 154.

hibited by Paley, in a chapter which is not diminished in interest by the fact that it was written during an acute disease which afterwards proved fatal:-"It is seldom both violent and long-continued: and its pauses and intermissions become positive pleasures. It has the power of shedding a satisfaction over intervals of ease, which, I believe, few enjoyments exceed. A man resting from a fit of the stone or gout, is, for the time, in possession of feelings which undisturbed health cannot impart. They may be dearly bought, but still they are to be set against the price. And, indeed, it depends upon the duration and urgency of the pain whether they be dearly bought or not. I am far from being sure that a man is not a gainer by suffering a moderate interruption of bodily ease for a couple of hours out of the four-and-twenty. Two very common observations favor this opinion: one is, that remissions of pain call forth, from those who experience them, stronger expressions of satisfaction and of gratitude toward both the Author and the instruments of their relief, than are excited by advantages of any other kind: the second is, that the spirits of sick men do not sink in proportion to the acuteness of their sufferings, but rather appear to be roused and supported, not by pain, but by the high degree of comfort which they derive from its cessation, or even its subsidency, whenever that occurs: and which they taste with a relish that diffuses some portion of mental complacency over the whole of that mixed state of sensations in which disease has placed them.”*

* Nat. Theol., chap. xxvi.

19*

c2. Death.

a3. In its existence.*

§ 159. Death is necessary to probation. Let us look, for a moment, at the difficulties which would arise from a perpetuity of life. Let us notice, in the first place, the repugnancy of such perpetuity to anything like a beneficent distribution of property. As it is, history tells us how injuriously society has been affected by the attempt to establish an accumulating fund for even a limited period of time. The Thelluson case is an illustration of this. The testator left a will providing that his large personal estate should be vested in trustees with directions to accumulate the fund for a hundred years. It was soon found that this would absorb all the floating capital of England. No step remained but to break the will, and this was effected by a decision of the House of Lords, which, though necessary, was clearly unconstitutional. A statute was subsequently passed to declare all such trusts void, ab initio.

Suppose that such a capitalist as Girard should live forever. If the division of talents and tastes continue as at present, in which such a man as himself, amid all the varieties of parsimony and avarice on the one side, and of profuseness and thriftlessness on the other, would stand preeminent for his acquisitive and retentive powers, what a scene would the world present, when such a genius, so intense, so capable, and so persistent, would be forever eating into the very vitals of others and gorging with them its

A portion of the remarks under this head was published by me in the Episcopal Review for July, 1858.

already mammoth frame! Only one of two alternatives would exist: one would be a series of violent proscriptive confiscations, which would drive the capitalist in howling rage before the face of a flock of prodigal pursuers, the very necessities of whose character would soon again place them at the feet of a foe made still more rapacious and remorseless by the maltreatment he had received.

§ 160. Suppose, however, that the other alternative be good, and that the man of wealth be permitted to go on and accumulate indefinitely, as would be the case in a wellordered government in our own time. Soon all small properties would be absorbed in his immense estate. His rents, we will suppose, would amount to a million of dollars in one year. He cannot spend this amount, and he turns it, therefore, to the purchase of new land, with a freshly augmented rental. Now, this can only end in the destruction of all small tenures, and, with them, would fall one of the most efficient engines we have for the welfare and comfort of society. No one can pass along the country road or the city street without seeing that to the tenant of the small farm, or of the small house, a much more than average amount of happiness is allotted. He has just the amount of comfort about him that best promotes health, without possessing that luxury which generates disease and languor. Labor-voluntary, and because voluntary, sweet-sufficient to employ, but not enough to exhaust, is his. Hope is his. And yet this condition of life, so peculiarly conducive to the well-being of society, would be destroyed by a perpetuity of life, unless under circumstances very different from our own.

Let us view, however, the effect of perpetual life on the

controversies and wars of men. Death, we cannot but feel, The sturdy Massachusetts volunteer,

is a great pacificator.

the resolute British guardsman, the reluctant Hessian, all lie peaceably together under the corn-fields of Monmouth. Napoleon, with the hatred of his intense and almost demoniac ambition, Charles X., with that of his stolid and narrow bigotry, now lie quietly almost side by side. The two duelists, who glared and fired at each other across the table, now rest tranquilly, with their arms folded across their breasts, in the same grave. Death quenches many a fire which otherwise would have desolated the globe. Ambition, when confined by the conditions of mortality, may, like the steam-engine, traverse its appointed track usefully, if not innocently. But, let the trains meet, let the snorting and shrieking monsters dash to and fro over lines intersecting each other indefinitely, and dismay and ruin ensue.

§ 161. See also what would be the condition of the church. At the same moment, and that moment a perpetuity, she would be meeting each of the several shocks which, in God's providence, have been heretofore distributed among ages. There would be the coarse abuse of Paine; the sly inuendo of Gibbon; the subtle sophism of Hume, armed by the imperial malignity of Julian. In meeting and repelling assaults so varied and so incessant, the danger would be that the entire spiritual character of the church would be lost. Fenelon, Leighton, Pascal, Martyn, would give place to men such as Hildebrand, as Atterbury, as Swift, as Bossuet, as Peter the Hermit. The saint would be merged in the confessor, the confessor in the crusader.

The constant presence, in fact, either in things civil or