ulator. The
light of the sun is equally beneficial to him whose eyes tell him that
it moves, and to him whose reason persuades him that it stands still;
and plants grow with the same luxuriance, whether we suppose earth or
water the parent of vegetation.

If we raise our thoughts to nobler inquiries, we shall still find
facility concurring with usefulness. No man needs stay to be virtuous,
till the moralists have determined the essence of virtue; our duty is
made apparent by its proximate consequences, though the general and
ultimate reason should never be discovered. Religion may regulate the
life of him to whom the Scotists and Thomists are alike unknown; and the
assertors of fate and free-will, however different in their talk, agree
to act in the same manner.

It is not my intention to depreciate the politer arts or abstruser
studies. That curiosity which always succeeds ease and plenty, was
undoubtedly given us as a proof of capacity which our present state is
not able to fill, as a preparative for some better mode of existence,
which shall furnish employment for the whole soul, and where pleasure
shall be adequate to our powers of fruition. In the mean time, let us
gratefully acknowledge that goodness which grants us ease at a cheap
rate, which changes the seasons where the nature of heat and cold has
not been yet examined, and gives the vicissitudes of day and night to
those who never marked the tropicks, or numbered the constellations.

No. 38. SATURDAY, JANUARY 6, 1759.

Since the publication of the letter concerning the condition of those
who are confined in gaols by their creditors, an inquiry is said to have
been made, by which it appears that more than twenty thousand[1] are at
this time prisoners for debt.

We often look with indifference on the successive parts of that, which,
if the whole were seen together, would shake us with emotion. A debtor
is dragged to prison, pitied for a moment, and then forgotten; another
follows him, and is lost alike in the caverns of oblivion; but when the
whole mass of calamity rises up at once, when twenty thousand reasonable
beings are heard all groaning in unnecessary misery, not by the
infirmity of nature, but the mistake or negligence of policy, who can
forbear to pity and lament, to wonder and abhor?

There is here no need of declamatory vehemence: we live in an age of
commerce and computation; let us, therefore, coolly inquire what is the
sum of evil whic