nd relaxed his
principles. In short, he had ceased to love virtue long before he
thought of committing actual vice; and the duties of a manly piety were
burdensome to him, before he was so debased as to offer perfumes, and
burn incense on the altar of the licentious goddess[3].

"LET us crown ourselves with rosebuds before they be withered," said
Solomon's libertine. Alas! he did not reflect that they withered in the
very gathering. The roses of pleasure seldom last long enough to adorn
the brow of him who plucks them; for they are the only roses which do
not retain their sweetness after they have lost their beauty.

THE heathen poets often pressed on their readers the necessity of
considering the shortness of life, as an incentive to pleasure and
voluptuousness; lest the season for indulging in them should pass
unimproved. The dark and uncertain notions, not to say the absolute
disbelief, which they entertained of a future state, is the only apology
that can be offered for this reasoning. But while we censure their
tenets, let us not adopt their errors; errors which would be infinitely
more inexcusable in us, who, from the clearer views which revelation has
given us, shall not have their ignorance or their doubts to plead. It
were well if we availed ourselves of that portion of their precept,
which inculcates the improvement of every moment of our time, but not
like them to dedicate the moments so redeemed to the pursuit of sensual
and perishable pleasures, but to the securing of those which are
spiritual in their nature, and eternal in their duration.

IF, indeed, like the miserable[4] beings imagined by Swift, with a view
to cure us of the irrational desire after immoderate length of days, we
were condemned to a wretched earthly immortality, we should have an
excuse for spending some portion of our time in dissipation, as we
might then pretend, with some colour of reason, that we proposed, at a
distant period, to enter on a better course of action. Or if we never
formed any such resolution, it would make no material difference to
beings, whose state was already unalterably fixed. But of the scanty
portion of days assigned to our lot, not one should be lost in weak
and irresolute procrastination.

THOSE who have not yet determined on the side of vanity, who, like
Hercules, (before he knew the queen of Lydia, and had learnt to spin)
have not resolved on their choice between VIRTUE and PLEASURE, may
reflect, that it