the thoughts of these
things happening three hundred and fifty years after his time? And why
should I be uneasy if I were to expect that some nation might possess
itself of this city, ten thousand years hence? Because so great is our
regard for our country, as not to be measured by our own feeling, but by
its own actual safety.

Death, then, which threatens us daily from a thousand accidents, and
which, by reason of the shortness of life, can never be far off, does not
deter a wise man from making such provision for his country and his
family, as he hopes may last for ever; and from regarding posterity, of
which he can never have any real perception, as belonging to himself.
Wherefore a man may act for eternity, even though he be persuaded that his
soul is mortal; not, indeed, from a desire of glory, which he will be
insensible of, but from a principle of virtue, which glory will inevitably
attend, though that is not his object. The process, indeed, of nature is
this; that just in the same manner as our birth was the beginning of
things with us, so death will be the end; and as we were no ways concerned
with anything before we were born, so neither shall we be after we are
dead; and in this state of things where can the evil be? since death has
no connexion with either the living or the dead; the one have no existence
at all, the other are not yet affected by it. They who make the least of
death consider it as having a great resemblance to sleep; as if any one
would choose to live ninety years on condition that, at the expiration of
sixty, he should sleep out the remainder. The very swine would not accept
of life on those terms, much less I: Endymion, indeed, if you listen to
fables, slept once on a time, on Latmus, a mountain of Caria, and for such
a length of time that I imagine he is not as yet awake. Do you think that
he is concerned at the Moon's being in difficulties, though it was by her
that he was thrown into that sleep, in order that she might kiss him while
sleeping; for what should he be concerned for who has not even any
sensation? You look on sleep as an image of death, and you take that on
you daily; and have you, then, any doubt that there is no sensation in
death, when you see there is none in sleep, which is its near resemblance?

XXXIX. Away, then, with those follies which are little better than the old
women's dreams, such as that it is miserable to die before our time. What
time do you mean? That o