BEhold this fore-most Wretch, whose strange Deformity and ghastly Sores equally exact our Pity and our Horrour; he seems so fit an Object for Compassion, that not to exercise it towards him can scarce proceed from any other Cause than the not having any at all: The sadness of his Condition is augmented by his want of Eyes to see it; and his Misery is such, that it calls for an increase of Pitty, by his being so Distracted, as to desire a longer Life, or rather longer Death: He sues more movingly to the Eye than to the Ear; and does Petition much less by what he says, than what he is: Each several Member of his tortur’d Body is a new Motive to Compassion, and every Part of it so loudly pleads for Pitty, that (as of Scoulds) it may (in another sence) be said of him, that he is all Tongue. But yet this other Beggar thinks not his Condition the less deplorable for his Companions being the more so: He finds in the Diseases of his Fellow as little Consolation, as Cure; nor does he at all think himself supply’d with a deficient hand, because the other wants one. And therefore, he is as importunate for Relief, as if all Miseries were not only heap’d on him, but confin’d to him: His fellows Burthen lightens not his Load; and if Fortune never had persecuted any other, he could not more deplore nor resent her Persecutions; so that, if we should judge of their Miseries rather by the Ear than by the Eye, this latter’s sadder Complaints would move us to decree him the Advantage in point of Wretchedness.
Translate now (O my Soul) all this unto Spirituals; and as we measure the straightness of Lines, not by a Ramms Horn, but a Ruler; so be not thou so Rash, as to infer thy Health from others more forlorn and desperate Diseases: Let not the greater difficulty of another’s Cure, lessen the sollicitousness of thy Care for thine, nor make thee the less earnest in the Imploring and Labouring for Relief. In so deprav’d an Age as Ours, one may (and perhaps in vain too) search Hell to find wickeder Men than are to be, but too frequently, met with upon Earth: He will scarce be innocent, that will think himself so as long as he finds a Man more culpable than he; and he shall scarce ever judge himself Guilty, whom the sight of a Guiltier will absolve: Nor will that Man (till ‘tis perhaps too late) be apt to attempt an Escape from the Pollutions of the World, that stays till he can see none more inextricably intangl’d in them than himself. Do not therefore, O my Soul, content thy self with that poor comparative Innocence that in Heaven (which it will never bring thee too) has no place, by reason of the absence of all vitious Persons; and in Hell it self (which it secures not from) can afford only the ill Natur’d consolation of not being altogether as Miserable as the wretchedest Person in that place of Torment.
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