should allow them with impunity to brave the laws, and commit, without apprehension, the most enormous crimes, provided their address be adequate to the screening them from the punishment of temporal justice? Such a system must be the misery and the destruction of the world.* The belief of a future state does not, indeed, always influence men in their conduct; yet it 'assuredly does at some moments and in some circumstances of their lives. "To say," says Montesquieu," that religion is not a curbing motive, because it does not always restrain, is like saying, the criminal jurisprudence of a country is not a curbing motive, because it does not always restrain." Thus an author who, to extirpate fanaticism and superstition, preaches atheism, is not more wise than he who would abolish the whole code of law, because there are some who do not observe its ordinances. But, in every view, whether of reason, or of hope, the belief of another life is much the safer side of the question. If we should happen to be mistaken, it costs us nothing: we may live much happier in this world than infidels do, and please ourselves with the entertaining * Holland, taining dreams of future happiness; which, if they should prove no better than dreams, are very delightful; and if death puts an end to us, we shall escape as well in the grave as infidels do. But, on the other side of the question we find the hazard of losing eternal happines, and of incurring hereafter such positive misery, as infinite wisdom may see fit to inflict. If we believe we shall perish in the grave, and live, as those who have no account to give of their actions, and should find ourselves mistaken in the other world, we must be miserable there. We ought certainly to demand the greatest evidence for that side of the question, where the mistake will do us the most irreparable chief; wherefore, nothing less than absolute demonstration can justify the disbelief of another world.* True philosophy, is the study of the noblest objects which can demand the attention of man. Theology and ethics, like different branches of a fruitful tree, spring from the same root, and that root is the actual system of things. As high as they can be trained up, so high they bear the genuine fruit of knowledge. But, when fantastical gardeners bend the tops of the highest E 2 highest sprigs, like the ficus Indica, down to the earth; if they take root, they bear fruit of an inferior kind, and serve only to plant a labyrinth, wherein the gardeners themselves are lost. It at the same time must be allowed, that he who imagines he can extend general knowledge by the force of pure intellect and abstract meditation, beyond the foundation he has laid in particular knowledge, is just as extravagant in thinking he has what he has not, as he who thinks he is what he is not. He is just as extravagant, as the architect would be, who should undertake to build the roof of the house on the ground, and to lay the foundations in the air.* All annihilating doctrines are nothing more than the apparent harmonies of misconceived opinions, having no existence in reality; but, they render the unsuspecting mind miserable. Not having the fortitude to be content with uncertainty, knowing its own weakness, and yet incessantly darting beyond its powers, it thus falls into a despondency which is scarcely to be relieved. "Hæ nugæ seria ducunt in mala.” And here let me ask, of what description are those guides, who would lead us to materialism • Bolingbroke. and and extinction? Who were ever so ready to charge others, while they were themselves so chargeable, with absurdity and inconsistency? Who ever railed so much against dogmatists, and were themselves so great dogmatists? Admitting the advantage of immortal hopes, yet contending with the zeal of martyrs for destruction and eternal death; reasoning with the pride of superior spirits, I had almost said the faculties of angels, to prove themselves brutes; these modern Epicureans are surely thus superlatively injurious. Their miserable acquisition, their wretched certainty of intellectual as well as of corporeal death, are but comfortless presents which they would confer upon their fellow creatures. In human life, the most glorious or humble prospects are alike, and soon bounded by the grave. The spider weaves his web in the imperial palace, and the owl sings her watch song on the towers of the mighty. But, we cannot doubt, that numberless worlds, and systems of worlds, compose this amazing whole, the universe; and as little, I think, that the planets which roll about the sun, or those which roll about a multitude of others, are inhabited by suitable E 3 → Cantemir. suitable living creatures. Shall we not be persuaded then, that as there is a gradation of sense and intelligence here, from animated beings, imperceptible to us from their minuteness, without the help of microscopes, and even with them, up to man, in whom, though this be their highest stage, sense and intelligence stop short and remain very imperfect; so there is a gradation from man, through various forms of sense, intelligence, and reason, up to beings, who cannot be known by us, because of their distance, and whose rank in the intellectual system is even above our conceptions?* Before the Christian dispensation, which alone holds out the glorious prospect of an immortality, the more philosophic systems of religion spoke only in a very general sense of a future state. They even seem to have covered with obscurity and mystery, a subject incapable of human explanation. The Magi of Persia, and the Brahmins of India, who entirely agreed in the doctrine, that the soul of man is a portion of the irresistible principle which pervades the body of the universe, placed the chief happiness after death, in a kind of absorption into the Di • Bolingbroke. vinity. |