more or less pleasing to themselves; and thereby remedy that, to which one may justly impute a great deal of their wandering.  Fashion and the common opinion having settled wrong notions, and education and custom ill habits, the just values of things are misplaced, and the palates of men corrupted.  Pains should be taken to rectify these; and contrary habits change our pleasures, and give a relish to that which is necessary or conducive to our happiness.  This every one must confess he can do; and when happiness is lost, and misery overtakes him, he will confess he did amiss in neglecting it, and condemn himself for it; and I ask every one, whether he has not often done so?

72.  Preference of Vice to Virtue a manifest wrong Judgment.

I shall not now enlarge any further on the wrong judgments and neglect of what is in their power, whereby men mislead themselves.  This would make a volume, and is not my business.  But whatever false notions, or shameful neglect of what is in their power, may put men out of their way to happiness, and distract them, as we see, into so different courses of life, this yet is certain, that morality established upon its true foundations, cannot but determine the choice in any one that will but consider:  and he that will not be so far a rational creature as to reflect seriously upon infinite happiness and misery, must needs condemn himself as not making that use of his understanding he should.  The rewards and punishments of another life which the Almighty has established, as the enforcements of his law, are of weight enough to determine the choice against whatever pleasure or pain this life can show, where the eternal state is considered but in its bare possibility which nobody can make any doubt of.  He that will allow exquisite and endless happiness to be but the possible consequence of a good life here, and the contrary state the possible reward of a bad one, must own himself to judge very much amiss if he does not conclude,—­That a virtuous life, with the certain expectation of everlasting bliss, which may come, is to be preferred to a vicious one, with the fear of that dreadful state of misery, which it is very possible may overtake the guilty; or, at best, the terrible uncertain hope of annihilation.  This is evidently so, though the virtuous life here had nothing but pain, and the vicious continual pleasure:  which yet is, for the most part, quite otherwise, and wicked men have not much the odds to brag of, even in their present possession; nay, all things rightly considered, have, I think, even the worse part here.  But when infinite happiness is put into one scale, against infinite misery in the other; if the worst that comes to the pious man, if he mistakes, be the best that the wicked can attain to, if he be in the right, who can without madness run the venture?  Who in his wits would choose to come within a possibility of infinite misery; which if he miss, there is yet nothing to be got by that hazard?  Whereas, on