Every man that has felt pain, knows how little
all other comforts can gladden him to whom health
is denied. Yet who is there does not sometimes
hazard it for the enjoyment of an hour? All
assemblies of jollity, all places of public entertainment,
exhibit examples of strength wasting in riot, and
beauty withering in irregularity; nor is it easy to
enter a house in which part of the family is not
groaning in repentance of past intemperance, and
part admitting disease by negligence, or soliciting
it by luxury.
There is no pleasure which men of every age and
sect have more generally agreed to mention with
contempt, than the gratifications of the palate; an
entertainment so far removed from intellectual
happiness, that scarcely the most shameless of the
sensual herd have dared to defend it: yet even to
this, the lowest of our delights, to this, though
neither quick nor lasting, is health with all its
activity and sprightliness daily sacrificed; and for this
are half the miseries endured which urge impatience
to call on death.
The whole world is put in motion by the wish
for the riches and the dread of poverty. Who, then,
would not imagine that such conduct as will inevitably
destroy what all are thus labouring to acquire,
must generally be avoided? That he who spends
more than he receives, must in time become
indigent, cannot be doubted; but, how evident soever
this consequence may appear, the spendthrift moves
in the whirl of pleasure with too much rapidity to
keep it before his eyes, and, in the intoxication of
gaiety, grows every day poorer without any such
sense of approaching ruin as is sufficient to wake
him into caution.
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