SECTION I. 5I$ in which then often deliberately and coolly dispatch themselves, and voluntarily flee out of life ; one because his mistress is not propitious to his passion ; another, because his sordid love of money has been disappointed ; another, because he has dissipated his whole fortune in the most dissolute and abandoned luxury and debauchery; another, because his scheme for advancement to honour has been dashed to pieces ; another, because in the midst of hoards of money, he is terrified with the dread of future want ; and others, perhaps, because the weather lies heavy upon them, and the wind blows from an unfavourable corner: And should they be acquainted, that in all these cases, their names and their examples are appealed to ; what would they say ? They would declare it a country of madmen and fools, and lament their own fate, to be cited for the justification, or excuse of odious, base and unseemly actions, which have no pretence worthy of a man, to cover them. "Not that I am at all," says this writer, " designing to justify those great men themselves. On the contrarymany things might be urged against those ancients, even upon -their own scheme, and the principles of reason. If I should say that the death of Cato was a mixture of impatience and pride ; that he ought in love to his country to have reserved himself for a better oppor- tunity of serving it ; that it is probable, from the events which followed, that he might afterwards have been an instrument of good to it ; that he rashly, and in a passion, judged of what he could not well judge of, that it was a sullen pride of heart not to deign to live, because in one trial, his cause had not been suc- cessful ; and that a true greatness of soul had been more seen, even in accepting his life, if that had been necessary, at the hands of the man, in whose power omnipotent providence or fate, which he believed irresistible, had put it : And this would be hard to refute upon the principles of any philosophy." I might add yet further, that though some of the philoso- phers among the heathens did allow, yet the best of them did utterly condemn this practice, as a rash forsaking the station in which the providence of their gods had placed men. Though I have argued particularly on this head already, yet in this place I cannot forbid myself the pleasure of citing the strong expressions of some of these heathens against self-murder, as they are agreeably represented by Dr. Samuel Clarke, in his discourse of Natural and Revealed Religion. Proposition the first. " He that sent us into the world, and alone knows for how long time he appointed us our station here, and when we have finished all the business he intended we should do, can alone judge when it is fit for us to be taken hence, and has alone au- thority to dismiss and discharge us. This reasoning has been
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