be secured by a fine face; by a passion
that has sense for its object; nor by the goodness of a wife's heart, nor
even example, if the heart of the husband be not graciously touched by
the Divine finger.

It will be seen, by this time, that the author had a great end in view.
He had lived to see the scepticism and infidelity openly avowed, and even
endeavoured to be propagated from the press; the greatest doctrines of
the Gospel brought into question; those of self-denial and mortification
blotted out of the catalogue of christian virtues; and a taste even to
wantonness for out-door pleasure and luxury, to the general exclusion of
domestic as well as public virtue, industriously promoted among all ranks
and degrees of people.

In this general depravity, when even the pulpit has lost great part of
its weight, and the clergy are considered as a body of interested men,
the author thought he should be able to answer it to his own heart, be
the success what it would, if he threw in his mite towards introducing a
reformation so much wanted: and he imagined, that if in an age given up
to diversion and entertainment, if he could steal in, as may be said, and
investigate the great doctrines of Christianity under the fashionable
guise of an amusement; he should be most likely to serve his purpose,
remembering that of the Poet:--

A verse may find him who a sermon flies,
And turn delight into a sacrifice.

He was resolved, therefore, to attempt something that never yet had been
done. He considered that the tragic poets have as seldom made their
heroes true objects of pity, as the comics theirs laudable ones of
imitation: and still more rarely have made them in their deaths look
forward to a future hope. And thus, when they die, they seem totally to
perish. Death, in such instances, must appear terrible. It must be
considered as the greatest evil. But why is death set in such shocking
lights, when it is the universal lot?

He has, indeed, thought fit to paint the death of the wicked, as terrible
as he could paint it. But he has endeavoured to draw that of the good in
such an amiable manner, that the very Balaams of the world should not
forbear to wish that their latter end might be like that of the heroine.

And after all, what is the poetical justice so much contended for by
some, as the generality of writers have managed it, but another sort of
dispensation than that with which God, by revelation, teaches