Page:Whole works of joseph butler.djvu/102

71 This was the man, this Balaam, I say, was the man, who desired to "die the death of the righteous," and that his "last end might be like his;" and this was the state of his mind when he pronounced these words.

So that the object we have now before us is the most astonishing in the world; a very wicked man, under a deep sense of God and religion, persisting still in his wickedness, and preferring the wages of unrighteousness, even when he had before him a lively view of death, and that approaching period of his days, which should deprive him of all those advantages for which he was prostituting himself; and likewise a prospect, whether certain or uncertain, of a future state of retribution. All this, joined with an explicit ardent wish, that when he was to leave this world, he might be in the condition of a righteous man. Good God! what inconsistency, what perplexity is here! With what different views of things, with what contradictory principles of action, must such a mind be torn and distracted! It was not unthinking carelessness by which he ran on headlong in vice and folly, without ever making a stand to ask himself what he was doing. No; he acted upon the cool motives of interest and advantage. Neither was he totally hard and callous to impressions of religion, what we call abandoned; for he absolutely denied to curse Israel. When reason assumes her place, when convinced of his duty, when he owns and feels, and is actually under the influence of the Divine authority—whilst he is carrying on his views to the grave, the end of all temporal greatness under the sense of things, with the better character and more desirable state present—full before him—in his thoughts, in his wishes, voluntarily to choose the worse—what fatality is here! Or how otherwise can such a character be explained? And yet, strange as it may appear, it is not altogether an uncommon one: nay, with some small alterations, and put a little lower, it is applicable to a very considerable part of the world. For, if the reasonable choice be seen and acknowledged, and yet