crime and punishment are related in Deuteronomy {21} and Numbers.
{22} And from the relation repeated in Numbers, {23} it appears,
that Balaam was the contriver of the whole matter. It is also
ascribed to him in the Revelation, {24} where he is said to have
taught Balak to cast a stumbling-block before the children of
Israel.

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