The only method of supporting Divine benevolence, and it is
what I willingly embrace, is to deny absolutely the misery and
wickedness of man. Your representations are exaggerated; your
melancholy views mostly fictitious; your inferences contrary to
fact and experience. Health is more common than sickness;
pleasure than pain; happiness than misery. And for one vexation
which we meet with, we attain, upon computation, a hundred
enjoyments.
Admitting your position, replied P/HILO\, which yet is
extremely doubtful, you must at the same time allow, that if pain
be less frequent than pleasure, it is infinitely more violent and
durable. One hour of it is often able to outweigh a day, a week,
a month of our common insipid enjoyments; and how many days,
weeks, and months, are passed by several in the most acute
torments? Pleasure, scarcely in one instance, is ever able to
reach ecstasy and rapture; and in no one instance can it continue
for any time at its highest pitch and altitude. The spirits
evaporate, the nerves relax, the fabric is disordered, and the
enjoyment quickly degenerates into fatigue and uneasiness. But
pain often, good God, how often! rises to torture and agony; and
the longer it continues, it becomes still more genuine agony and
torture. Patience is exhausted, courage languishes, melancholy
seizes us, and nothing terminates our misery but the removal of
its cause, or another event, which is the sole cure of all evil,
but which, from our natural folly, we regard with still greater
horror and consternation.
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