Page:The Bible of Nature, and Substance of Virtue.djvu/48

38 a mass of putrefaction, consisting of a few bones, and a network or complication of nerves, veins, and arteries. The vital spirit is only a small portion of air, (and that not always the same but every hour drawn in fresh, and again expelled by the action of the lungs. But the third part is the rational soul or governing principle — here make a pause!

Even those events ascribed to fortune or chance are subject to the laws of Nature, and to that complicated series of things established by Fate, and administered by Providence. From this source all things are derived. Indeed every thing is thus fixed and ordered, as necessary for the good of the whole, of which you are a part. Now that which conduces to the good of the whole system of Nature, and to its preservation, must also be good to every part of the universe. Yet this world itself subsists by continual changes, not only of the elements, but of those things which are composed of those elements, in a perpetual circle of successive generation and corruption.

You have a fixed period assigned you, which if you do not improve to calm your passage and procure the tranquillity of your mind, it will be past, never to return, and you yourself will be no more. Take care always to perform strenuously the business in hand, as becomes a man and a Roman, with attention and unaffected gravity, with humanity, liberality, and justice ; and call off your thoughts, for the time, from every other object. This you will do, if you perform every action as if it were the last of your life; if you act without levity or dissimulation, free from selfishness and from every passion inimical to right reason; and lastly from a peevishness and dissatisfaction at those events, which are necessarily connected with our lot. You see how few things are necessary to a happy and almost godlike state of life.

You will hardly find any man unhappy from being ignorant of what passes in the thoughts of other people ; but he that does not attend to the regulaton of his own thoughts, must necessarily be miserable. We ought frequently to reflect on the nature of the universe, and on our own nature; and what that whole is of which we are a part, and how the latter is regulated with regard to the former. We ought further to refiect, that nothing can prevent us from acting and speaking agreeably to that universal Nature, of which we are a part