““ UNSTABLE AS WATER.” 21)

as if no accident could intervene to prevent my enjoying the crop
that was upon the ground; and this I thought so just a reproof,
that I resolved for the future to have two or three years’ corn
beforehand, so that whatever might come, I might not perish for
want of bread.

How strange a checker-work of providence is the life of man!
and by what secret differing springs are the affections hurried
about, as differing circumstances present! To-day we love what
to-morrow we hate; to-day we seek what to-morrow we shun;
to-day we desire what to-morrow we fear—nay, even tremble at
the apprehensions of. This was exemplified in me at this time in
the most lively manner imaginable: for I, whose only affliction
was that I seemed banished from human society, that I was alone,
circumscribed by the boundless ocean, cut of from mankind, and
condemned to what I called silent life—that I was as one whom
Heaven thought not worthy to be numbered among the living, or
to appear among the rest of his creatures; that to have seen one
of my own species would have seemed to me a raising me from
death to life, and the greatest blessing that Heaven itself, next to
the supreme blessing of salvation, could bestow;—I say, that I
should now tremble at the very apprehensions of seeing a man,
and was ready to sink into the ground at but the shadow or silent
appearance of a man’s having set his foot in the island.

Such is the uneven state of human life. And it afforded mea
great many curious speculations afterwards, when I had a little
recovered my first surprise. I considered that this was the station
of life the infinitely wise and good providence of God had deter-
mined for me; that as I could not foresee what the ends of divine
wisdom might be in all this, so I was not to dispute his sove-
reignty, who, as I was his creature, had an undoubted right by
creation to govern and dispose of me absolutely as he thought fit ;
and who, as I was a creature who had offended him, had likewise
a judicial right to condemn me to what punishment he thought fit ;
and that it was my part to submit to bear his indignation, because
I had sinned against him.

I then reflected that God, who was not only righteous but
omnipotent, as he had thought fit thus to punish and afflict me, se