provisions for happiness. The
provision is made; and; being made, is left to act according to laws
which, forming a part of a more general system, regulate this particular
subject in common with many others.

Let the constant recurrence to our observation of contrivance, design,
and wisdom, in the works of nature, once fix upon our minds the belief
of a God, and after that all is easy. In the counsels of a being
possessed of the power and disposition which the Creator of the universe
must possess, it is not improbable that there should be a future state;
it is not improbable that we should be acquainted with it. A future
state rectifies everything; because, if moral agents be made, in the
last event, happy or miserable, according to their conduct in the
station and under the circumstances in which they are placed, it seems
not very material by the operation of what causes, according to what
rules, or even, if you please to call it so, by what chance or caprice
these stations are assigned, or these circumstances determined. This
hypothesis, therefore, solves all that objection to the divine care and
goodness which the promiscuous distribution of good and evil (I do not
mean in the doubtful advantages of riches and grandeur, but in the
unquestionably important distinctions of health and sickness, strength
and infirmity, bodily ease and pain, mental alacrity and depression) is
apt on so many occasions to create. This one truth changes the nature of
things; gives order to confusion; makes the moral world of a piece with
the natural.

Nevertheless, a higher degree of assurance than that to which it is
possible to advance this, or any argument drawn from the light of
nature, was necessary, especially to overcome the shock which the
imagination and the senses received from the effects and the appearances
of death, and the obstruction which thence arises to the expectation of
either a continued or a future existence. This difficulty, although of a
nature no doubt to act very forcibly, will be found, I think, upon
reflection to reside more in our habits of apprehension than in the
subject: and that the giving way to it, when we have any reasonable
grounds or the contrary, is rather an indulging of the imagination than
anything else. Abstractedly considered, that is, considered without
relation to the difference which habit, and merely habit, produces in
our faculties and modes of apprehension, I do not see anything more in
the