desires are immoderate, or when they suffer their passions to overpower their reason, and dwell upon delightful scenes of future honours, power, or riches, till they mistake probabilities for certainties, or wild wishes for rational expectations. If such men, when they awake from these voluntary dreams, find the pleasing phantom vanish away, what can they blame but their own folly?
With no greater reason can we impute to providence the fears and anxieties that harass and distract us; for they arise from too close an adherence to those things from which we are commanded to disengage our affections. We fail of being happy, because we determine to obtain felicity by means different from those which God hath appointed. We are forbidden to be too solicitous about future events; and is the author of that prohibition to be accused, because men make themselves miserable by disregarding it?
Poverty, indeed, is not always the effect of wickedness, it may often be the consequence of virtue; but it is not certain that poverty is an evil. If we exempt the poor man from all the miseries to which his condition exposes him from the wickedness of others, if we secure him from the cruelty of oppression, and the contumelies of pride; if we suppose him to rate no enjoyment of this life, beyond its real and intrinsick value; and to indulge no desire more than reason and religion allow; the inferiority of his station will very little diminish his happiness; and, therefore, the poverty of the virtuous reflects no reproach upon providence. But poverty, like many other miseries of life, is often little more than an imaginary calamity. Men often call themselves poor, not because they want necessaries, but because they have not more than they want. This, indeed, is not always the case, nor ought we ever to harden our hearts against the cries of those who implore our assistance, by supposing that they feel less than they express; but let us all relieve the necessitous according to our abilities, and real poverty will soon be banished out of the world.
