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The cairn

Chapter 164: Resignation.
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About This Book

A compact miscellany of short essays, anecdotes, prayers, poems, and biographical sketches that collects reflections on grief, maternal love, benevolence, virtue, taste, and historical episodes. The pieces alternate personal memories, moral aphorisms, humorous and touching anecdotes, and brief portraits of public figures, often framed as letters, epitaphs, or short narratives. Recurring themes include the effects of sorrow and joy, domestic affection, charity, the vicissitudes of fortune, and the consolations of faith and art. The tone moves between intimate recollection and light moralizing, presenting varied, self-contained vignettes meant to instruct, console, and amuse.

Resignation.

The miseries, the calamities, the heart-rendings, and the tears, which are so intimately interwoven by the great Artist in our natures as not to be separated in a single instance, are in the first place, our security of a future state, and in the next place, seem to slope the way before us, and by gradual operation fit our minds for viewing, with some sort of fortitude, that hideous chasm that lies between us and that state, death. View those miseries, then, as the special acts of mercy and commiseration of a beneficent Creator, who with every calamity, melts away a link of that earthly chain that fetters our wishes to this dismal world. Accept his blessings and his goods when he sends them, with gratitude and enjoyment; receive his afflictions too with as joyous acceptance, and as hearty gratitude.

Thus, and not otherwise, you will realize all your Utopian flights of desire; by turning every thing to matter of comfort, and living contented with dispensations which you cannot alter, and if you could, would most assuredly alter for the worse. So limited is man, so imperfect in his nature, that the extent of his virtues borders on vice, and the extent of his wisdom on error.”