Page:The Works of Samuel Johnson ... A journey to the Hebrides. The vision of Theodore, the hermit of Teneriffe. The fountains. Prayers and meditations. Sermons.v. 10-11. Parliamentary debates.pdf/360

 which it is not easy for any one that has not known them, to estimate the force, and represent the danger.

We see, every day, men blessed with abundance, and reveling indelight, yet overborn by ungovernable desires of increasing their acquisitions; and breaking through the boundaries of religion, to pile heaps on heaps, and add one superfluity to another, to obtain only nominal advantages and imaginary pleasures.

For these we see friendships broken, justice violated, and nature forgotten; we see crimes committed, without the prospect of obtaining any positive pleasure, or removing any real pain. We see men toiling through meanness and guilt, to obtain that which they can enjoy only in idea, and which will supply them with nothing real which they do not already abundantly possess.

If men formed by education and enlightened by experience, men whose observations of the world cannot but have shown them the necessity of virtue, and who are able to discover the enormity of wickedness, by tracing its original, and pursuing its consequences, can fall before such temptations, and, in opposition to knowledge and conviction, prefer to the happiness of pleasing God the flatteries of dependents, or the smiles of power; what may not be expected from him who is pushed forward into sin by the impulse of poverty, who lives in continual want of what he sees wasted by thousands in negligent extravagance, and whose pain is every moment aggravated by the contempt of those whom nature has subjected to the same necessities with himself, and who are only his superiour by that wealth which they know not how to possess with moderation or decency?

How strongly may such a man be tempted to declare war upon the prosperous and the great! With what obstinacy and fury may he rush on from one outrage to another, impelled on one part by the pressure of necessity, and attracted on the other by the prospect of happiness; of happiness, which he sees sufficient to elevate those that possess it above the consideration of their own nature,