mselves; even these persons will be under great
restraints from the same affection in others. Thus a man who has himself
no sense of injustice, cruelty, oppression, will be kept from running the
utmost lengths of wickedness by fear of that detestation, and even
resentment of inhumanity, in many particular instances of it, which
compassion for the object towards whom such inhumanity is exercised,
excites in the bulk of mankind. And this is frequently the chief danger
and the chief restraint which tyrants and the great oppressors of the
world feel.

In general, experience will show that, as want of natural appetite to
food supposes and proceeds from some bodily disease; so the apathy the
Stoics talk of as much supposes, or is accompanied with, somewhat amiss
in the moral character, in that which is the health of the mind. Those
who formerly aimed at this upon the foot of philosophy appear to have had
better success in eradicating the affections of tenderness and compassion
than they had with the passions of envy, pride, and resentment: these
latter, at best, were but concealed, and that imperfectly too. How far
this observation may be extended to such as endeavour to suppress the
natural impulses of their affections, in order to form themselves for
business and the world, I shall not determine. But there does not appear
any capacity or relation to be named, in which men ought to be entirely
deaf to the calls of affection, unless the judicial one is to be
excepted.

And as to those who are commonly called the men of pleasure, it is
manifest that the reason they set up for hardness of heart is to avoid
being interrupted in their course by the ruin and misery they are the
authors of; neither are persons of this character always the most free
from the impotencies of envy and resentment. What may men at last bring
themselves to, by suppressing their passions and affections of one kind,
and leaving those of the other in their full strength? But surely it
might be expected that persons who make pleasure their study and their
business, if they understood what they profess, would reflect, how many
of the entertainments of life, how many of those kind of amusements which
seem peculiarly to belong to men of leisure and education they became
insensible to by this acquired hardness of heart.

I shall close these reflections with barely mentioning the behaviour of
that divine Person, who was the example of all perfection in hu