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Updated: May 29, 2025
In the evening exhortation, which it had been the Superior's custom to add to the prayers of the vesper-hour, he dwelt with a terrible and ghastly eloquence on the loss of the soul. "Brethren," he said, "believe me, the very first hour of a damned spirit in hell will outweigh all the prosperities of the most prosperous life.
The deed was grand; the hearts of men everywhere were more or less its accomplices; all the tides of history ran in its favor; kings, forgetting themselves into virtue and generosity, lent it good wishes or even good arms; it was successful; and on its primary success waited such prosperities as the world has seldom seen.
The commons expressed their admiration of that true greatness of mind which disposed his majesty's heart, in the midst of prosperities, to wish a stop put to the effusion of Christian blood, and to see tranquillity restored.
But a sincere piety, which sympathises with all the adversities and prosperities of the Christian cause, and knows the general and especially the personal consequences of such deplorable inconsistencies, will commiserate, and weep, and pray. The importunity of Lydia was no less honorable to Paul and his coadjutors than to herself. It proves their delicacy and consideration.
Such was the sanctimonious clergyman, with his white cravat, who visited me with a subscription-paper, which he himself had drawn up, in a case of heart-rending distress; the respectable and ruined tradesman, going from door to door, shy and silent in his own person, but accompanied by a sympathizing friend, who bore testimony to his integrity, and stated the unavoidable misfortunes that had crushed him down; or the delicate and prettily dressed lady, who had been bred in affluence, but was suddenly thrown upon the perilous charities of the world by the death of an indulgent, but secretly insolvent father, or the commercial catastrophe and simultaneous suicide of the best of husbands; or the gifted, but unsuccessful author, appealing to my fraternal sympathies, generously rejoicing in some small prosperities which he was kind enough to term my own triumphs in the field of letters, and claiming to have largely contributed to them by his unbought notices in the public journals.
The incense of all prosperities sends up its smoke, the altar of all joy flames, the perfumed air circulates! Beings with divine smiles, robed in white tunics bordered with blue, flit lightly before the eyes and show us visions of supernatural beauty, shapes of an incomparable delicacy. The Loves hover in the air and waft the flames of their torches!
For, it seemeth that as the sea-billowes and surging waves, rage and storme against the surly pride and stubborne height of our buildings, so are there above, certaine spirits that envie the rising prosperities and greatnesse heere below. A hidden power so mens states hath out-worne Faire swords, fierce scepters, signes of honours borne, It seemes to trample and deride in scorne.
You may have on this side of the sea risen in fortune, and, like Daniel, have become great, and may have come into prosperities which you never could have reached if you had stayed there, and you may have many windows to your house bay-windows, and sky-light-windows, and windows of conservatory, and windows on all sides but you have at least one window open toward Jerusalem.
The same transport which the occurrence of the best events in the best order would occasion me, I must learn to taste purer in the perception that my position is every hour meliorated, and does already command those events I desire. That exultation is only to be checked by the foresight of an order of things so excellent as to throw all our prosperities into the deepest shade.
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