This whole chapter upon health abounds in the highest practical wisdom, and the hints in it might easily be expanded to a volume. I only add, that I earnestly recommend a poem upon the same subject, one, as it seems to me, among the most classical and beautiful in our language, and which has become strangely and undeservedly obsolete—Dr Armstrong’s Art of Health.
How often have similar thoughts pressed upon my mind, as I have stood over the bed of the sick and dying! Here is the peculiar empire of minds truly and nobly benevolent, where the head and main prop of a family is preparing to conflict with the last enemy: where pain and groans, terror and death, fill the foreground, and the dim but inevitable perspective of desolation, struggle and want, in contact with indifference and selfishness, opens in the distance before the survivors. Let us thank God for religion. Philosophy may inculcate stern endurance and wise submission; but knows not a fit and adequate remedy. The hopes and the example imparted by him who went about doing good, are alone sufficient for the relief of such cases, of which, alas! our world is full.
No view of human life is more consoling or just than that presented in these paragraphs. Yet no human calculation will ever reach the sum of agony that has been inflicted by the jealousy, envy and heart-burning that have resulted from that most erroneous persuasion, that certain conditions and circumstances of life bring happiness in themselves. Beautifully has the bible said, that ‘God has set one thing over against another’—has balanced the real advantages of the different human conditions. The result of my experience would leave me in doubt and at a loss, in selecting the condition which I should deem most congenial to happiness. I should have to balance abundance of food, on the one hand, against abundance of appetite, on the other; the habit superinduced by the necessity of being satisfied with a little, with the habit of being disgusted with the trial of much. There are joys, numerous and vivid, peculiar to the rich; and others, in which none but those in the humbler conditions of life can participate. In the whole range of the enjoyment of the senses, if there be any advantage, it belongs to the poor. The laws of our being have surrounded the utmost extent of human enjoyment with adamantine walls, which one condition can no more overleap than another. It is wonderful to see this admirable adjustment, like the universal laws of nature, acting everywhere and upon everything. Even in the physical world, what is granted to one country is denied to another; and the wanderer who has seen strange lands and many cities, in different climes, only returns to announce, as the sum of his experience and the teaching of years, that light and shadow, comfort and discomfort, pleasure and pain, like air and water, are diffused in nearly similar measures over the whole earth.
It needs but little acquaintance with human condition to perceive, in the general adjustment of advantages settled by Providence, that great proportions of them have been thrown into opposite scales, and so contrasted that the selection of one class implies the rejection of the other. For example, smitten with the thousand temptations of wealth, you are determined to be rich. Be it so. Industry, frugality and the convergence of your faculties to this single point will hardly fail to render you so. But then you will not be so absurd as to envy another the fame of talents and acquirements which required absorbing devotion to pursuits incompatible with yours.
You are rich, and complain of satiety and ennui. Knew you not, when you determined to be rich, that poor people sing and dance about their cabin fires? You have gained power and distinction and discovered the heartless selfishness of your competitors and dependents. Were you ignorant that friendship can only be purchased by friendship; and that, in selecting your all-engrossing pursuit, you have precluded yourself from furnishing your quota of the reciprocity? The choices of life are alternatives. You may select from this scale, or that. But, in most cases, you cannot take from both. How much murmuring would be arrested if this most obvious truth were understood and men would learn to be satisfied with their alternative! Choose wisely and deliberately; and then quietly repose on your choice. Say, ‘I have this; another has that. I am certain that I have my choice. I do not know but his condition was forced upon him.’
If I have ever allowed myself the indulgence of envy, it is after having tasted the pleasure of rewarding merit, or relieving distress, in thinking how continually such celestial satisfactions are within the reach of the opulent. What a calm is left in the mind after having wiped away tears! What aspirations are excited in noting the joy and gratitude consequent upon misery relieved! How delightful to recur to the remembrance during the vigils of the night watches! How it expands the heart to reflect upon the consciousness of the all powerful and all good Being, measuring the circuit of the universe in doing good! Unhappily, the experience of all time demonstrates that the possession of opulence and power not only has no direct tendency to inspire increased sensibility to such satisfactions, but has an opposite influence. For one, rendered more kind and benevolent by good fortune, how many become callous, selfish and proud by it! Kindly and wisely has Providence seen fit to spare most men this dangerous trial.