The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant / Being a collection of select pieces from our best modern writers, calculated to eradicate vulgar prejudices and rusticity of manners, improve the understanding, rectify the will, purify the passions, direct the minds of youth to the pursuit of proper objects, and to facilitate their reading, writing, and speaking the English language with elegance and propriety

by John Hamilton Moore

4. This religious fear, when it is produced by just apprehensions of a divine power, naturally overlooks all human greatness that stands in competition with it, and extinguishes every other terror that can settle itself in the heart of a man: it lessens and contracts the figure of the most exalted person: it disarms the tyrant and executioner, and represents to our minds the most enraged and the most powerful as altogether harmless and impotent.

5. There is no true fortitude which is not founded upon this fear, as there is no other principle of so settled and fixed a nature. Courage that grows from constitution, very often forsakes a man when he has occasion for it; and when it is only a kind of instinct in the soul, breaks out on all occasions without judgment or discretion. That courage which proceeds from a sense of our duty, and from a fear of offending him that made us, acts always in an uniform manner, and according to the dictates of right reason.

6. What can a man fear who takes care in all his actions to please a Being that is omnipotent; a Being who is able to crush all his adversaries; a Being that can divert any misfortune from befalling him, or turn any such misfortune to his advantage? The person who lives with this constant and habitual regard to the great superintendant of the world, is indeed sure that no real evil can come into his lot.

7. Blessings may appear under the shape of pains, losses and disappointments, but let him have patience, and he will see them in their proper figures. Dangers may threaten him, but he may rest satisfied that they will either not reach him, or that if they do, they will be the instruments of good to him. In short, he may lock upon all crosses and accidents, sufferings and afflictions, as means which are made use of to bring him to happiness.

8. This is even the worst of that man's condition whose mind is possessed with the habitual fear of which I am now speaking. But it very often happens, that those which appear evils in our own eyes, appear also as such to him who has human nature under his care, in which case they are certainly averted from the person who has made himself, by this virtue, an object of divine favour.

9. Histories are full of instances of this nature, where men of virtue have had extraordinary escapes out of such dangers as have enclosed them, and which have seemed inevitable.

10. There is no example of this kind in Pagan history which more pleases me than that which is recorded in the life of Timoleon. This extraordinary man was famous for referring all his successes to Providence. Cornelius Nepos acquaints us that he had in his house a private chapel in which he used to pay his devotions to the goddess who represented Providence among the heathens. I think no man was ever more distinguished by the Deity, whom he blindly worshipped, than the great person I am speaking of, in several occurrences of his life, but particularly in the following one, which I shall relate out of Plutarch.

11. Three persons had entered into a conspiracy to assassinate Timoleon as he was offering up his devotions in a certain temple. In order to it they took their several stands in the most convenient places for their purpose. As they were waiting for an opportunity to put their design in execution, a stranger having observed one of the conspirators, fell upon him and slew him. Upon which the other two, thinking their plot had been discovered, threw themselves at Timoleon's feet, and confessed the whole matter.

12. This stranger, upon examination, was found to have understood nothing of the intended assassination, but having several years before had a brother killed by the conspirator, whom he here put to death, and having till now sought in vain for an opportunity of revenge, he chanced to meet the murderer in the temple, who had planted himself there for the above-mentioned purpose.

13. Plutarch cannot forbear on this occasion, speaking with a kind of rapture on the schemes of Providence, which, in this particular, had so contrived it that the stranger should, for so great a space of time, be debarred the means of doing justice to his brother, till by the same blow that revenged the death of one innocent man, he preserved the life of another.