people, might have been heard with unconcern, and lightly passed over as
foreign to the matters requiring their attention: it was all over with the
people dead, and the people alive had their own concerns to mind. But
would not exactly such as these have been the men most likely to fall into
the vices and impieties which would provoke the next avenging visitation,
and to perish in it? In all times, the triflers with the great
exemplifications of the connection of depravity with misery and ruin, who
thought it but an impertinent moralizing that attempted to recall such
funereal spectacles for admonition, were fools, whatever self-complacency
they might feel in a habit of thinking more fitted, they would perhaps
say, for making our best advantage of the world as we find it. And we of
the present time are convicted of exceeding stupidity, if we think it not
worth while to go a number of ages back to contemplate the mass of
mankind, the wide world of beings such as ourselves, sunk in darkness and
wretchedness, and to consider what it is that is taught by so melancholy
an exhibition. What is to give fulness of evidence to an instruction, if a
world be too narrow; what is to give it weight, if a world be too light?

It is to be acknowledged, that the mental darkness which we are
representing as so greatly the cause of the wickedness and unhappiness of
those nations of old, had the effect of protecting them, in a measure,
from some kinds of suffering. They had not, as we have been observing,
illumination enough, to have conscience enough, for inflicting the
severest pains of remorse; and for oppressing them with a distinct
alarming apprehension of a future account. But that they were unhappy,
was practically acknowledged in the very quality of what they ardently
and universally sought as the highest felicities of existence. Those
delights were violent and tumultuous, in all possible ways and degrees
estranged from reflection, and adverse to it. The whole souls of great
and small, in the most barbarous and in the more polished state, were