Let us first consult the scales whether he is sufficiently provided for already. Here are several calamities,—poverty, a wife with bad health, the neglect of former friends, with some others. But you see he has also a stock of blessings; I will put both into the scales: the blessings are much the heaviest.
SLEEPER.
What can they be? This curate must have great sagacity in the discovery of blessings, if he can detect any in his own condition.
SPIRIT.
These blessings are all of the same kind; they are all hopes.
SLEEPER.
Do hopes pass for real blessings?
SPIRIT.
Why not? You see by the scales that the happiness they impart is greater than the misery from all these calamities. We will try the hopes singly against the evils. I empty the scales, then I put into one the clergyman's poverty, his heaviest grievance, and in the other scale I place a hope of future wealth. You see the hope prevails over the affliction: he has more pleasure in hoping to be rich than grief in being poor. Then here is the bad health of his wife, and here a hope that she may speedily have new strength; the hope, again, is the heaviest. But besides these hopes of relief from particular calamities, here are many other fictions which he is accustomed to enjoy in his hours of leisure. Here is a hope that his third son, now a school-boy, and designed for the bar, may be a Judge at the age of forty-two; and this weight hopes that a certain nobleman may accidentally hear him preach, and may be charmed by his doctrine, language, and manner, so as to bestow upon him a rich living with an excellent house.