Wesley Corpus

iv. 2.) And, indeed, it appears that the miseries of life are so numerous as to over-balance all its real comforts, and sufficiently to show, that mankind now lie under evident marks of their Maker’s displeasure, as being degenerated from that state of innocence wherein they were at first created.” (Pages 380, 381.) “BUT it is objected, “If human life in general is miserable, how is it that all men are so unwilling to die?’ “I answer, 1. Because they fear to meet with more misery in another life than they feel in this. So our Poet, ‘The weariest and most loathed worldly life That pain, age, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, ’tis a paradise To what we fear of death.’ “And in another place : “If by the sleep of death we could but end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’twere a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. O who would bear The oppressor's wrongs, the proud man’s contumely, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, With all the long calamities of life; When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would bear such burdens, And groan and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death-- That undiscover'd country, from whose border No traveller returns--puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have, Than fly to others which are all unknown.” “If you say, “But the Heathens knew nothing of a future life; and yet they too, in all their generations, have been unwilling to die; nor would they put an end to their own life, were it never so miserable;’ I answer, Most of the ancient, as well as the modern, Heathens, had some motions of an after-state, and some fears of punishment in another life for sins committed in this. And in the politer nations they generally supposed self-murderers in particular would be punished after death.” (Pages 384, 385.) Prorima deinde tenent maesti loca, qui sibi lethum Insontes peperére manu, lucemque perosi Projecáre animas. Quam vellent aethere in alto Nunc et pauperiem et duros perferre labores / Fata obstant : Duraque palus innabilis unda Alligat, et novies Styr interfusa coercet. ‘The next in place and punishment are they Who prodigally throw their lives away.