The reasons of the Christian religion the first part, of godliness, proving by natural…

2. If so, then that the possibility or probability obligeth us to regard it in our hopes, fears, and endeavours before all this World, is evident from the incomparableness of them, or great disparity of the things. When most of the World think there is another life, and there is so much for it as we here lay down, and a few Atheists say only [we do not believe it, or it is not likely, though it be not a thing that we are certain of] now Reason commandeth every man that loveth himself, to prefer it before all earthly things. Because we are fully certain beyond all doubt, that all earthly things are of short duration, and will quickly leave us: and when they are gone, they are to us as if they had never been: They are a shadow, a dream, a something which is next to nothing: To say, It will shortly have an end, doth blot out the praise, and embitter the pleasures of all below. What the better are all generations past, for all the wealth and fleshly pleasures which they ever received in the World? There is no wise man,¹ but would prefer the least probability of attaining full felicity, and escaping death and torments, before the certainty of possessing a pin or a penny for an hour. The disparity is much greater between things temporal and everlasting, than any such similitude can reach. All the Christians,² and all the Mahometans, and most of the Heathens of the World do hold the Immortality of the Soul; and the perpetuity of the Happiness or misery hereafter: The Atheist is not sure of the contrary: and he is sure that a few years or hours will put an end to all his temporal pleasures, and equal those that lived here in pleasure and in pain: And therefore that at the worst his loss or hazard of the pleasures of sin for the hopes of eternal pleasure, is not a thing considerable: If those that dissent from him prove in the right, the sensualist ⟨p. 139⟩is utterly undone for ever: He must live in endless pain and misery, and must lose an endless unspeakable joy and glory which he might have possest as well as others: But if he himself prove in the right, he gets nothing by it but the pleasing of inordinate concupiscence for a few years; and will die with as much emptiness of content as if he had lived in continual pain.