780 
AN ESSAY ON THE FUTURE EXISTENCE 
noraena of benevolence, which we remark in such numerous 
instances, all apparently only part of a great whole, authorize us 
to suppose others which are necessary to complete the design. 
This supposition is forced upon the mind by the circumstances 
in which it is placed, and by the evidence of so many probabilities 
in the chequered scene of animated creatures. A future life is 
the one thing needful to reconcile all the apparent anomalies in the 
moral administration of the world ; without it all is doubt and 
uncertainty. 
In the present world no account appears to be made either of 
human* or brute life. Men, as inhabitants of the earfli, seem to be 
of as little estimation in the great scale of being as the microscopic 
insect or the most minute flow r er. We behold thousands of human 
beings with their tens of thousands of animals dispersed over a rich 
tract of country, swallowed up by an earthquake, swept away by an 
inundation, or buried under the fiery entrails of a volcano ; and in 
the cases in which these calamities occur, the events themselves 
seem as much in the natural course of things, as it is to behold the 
blossom of an orchard blasted by the east wind, or the hopes of 
the harvest rendered abortive by too much rain or too little sun- 
shine. 
It is true that there are instances on record where the special 
interference of the Almighty has occurred to prevent such catas- 
trophes. There is a little history in the Old Testament, that of 
Jonah, which shews this in an interesting view, inasmuch as the 
special care of the Deity extended to the cattle as well as to the 
other inhabitants. “ The prophet, in a moment of strange incon- 
siderateness, was offended at the failure of his prediction, and he 
went out of the city, and sat down to see what would become of it ; 
and, vegetation being rapid in those countries, a gourd grew 
quickly up, and, on the following day, sheltered him from the heat 
of the noonday sun. In the course of the next day the gourd 
was destroyed, and, when the sun beat hot upon the head of the 
prophet, he fainted, and wished to die. And God said to Jonah, 
* Dost thou well to be angry for the gourd V and he said, ‘ I do 
well to be angry, even unto death.’ Then said the Lord, ‘ Thou 
hast had pity on the gourd, for which thou hast not laboured, neither 
madest it grow, which came up in a night, and perished in a night; 
and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are 
* The supply of men alone to the French army 
From 1791 to 1792 was 1,270,000 
From 1793 to 1798 was 5,992,000 
From 1798 to 1799 was 860,000 
From 1804 to 1814 was 3,865,000 
