EPISTLES PHILOSOPHICAL AND MORAL.
LONDON: Printed for T. WILCOX, opposite the
New-Church,
in the
Strand,
M.DCCLIX.
To The First
Minister
of
STATE,
for the
Time
being.
HAIL mighty
Pam!
if song without offence
Thus hail the first court card in eminence,
Thou in whom kings find oft the sov'reign sway;
For kings at
loo
the leading knave obey:
Or if, content to play an humbler game,
Plain
Jack
we stile thee, more familiar name,
Thou, whose sly blows the
lower
party feels,
While bent the
high
to catch thy tripping
heels;
Great in thyself, whatever thou art call'd,
Nations by thee enfranchis'd or inthrall'd,
Holla'd to day to
Palace-yard
along,
Flatter'd at once in metzotint and song;
Or piqu'd, perhaps, while chimes the present line,
Ere yet
turn'd out,
as usual, to
resign;
Branded by th' honest satire of the times
With all a minister's mysterious crimes!
To thee I pay my court, till in disgrace,
And then as humbly to the next in place.
For know, what private worth soe'er thy boast,
I not address thy person, but thy post;
Is there a time when statesmen, good or great,
Look down with pity on the toils of state;
Superiour to the boast of boasted things,
The pomp of titles, and the smile of kings:
When, in the private hour of social ease,
Ambition sleeps, and truth itself may please?
At such an hour, when ev'n politeness deigns
To taste the rudeness of familiar strains,
Presuming thou, in honour to the muse,
Indulgent once her labours may peruse,
To thee those honest labours she commends:
At court while honest doubtless finding friends.
But, through thy levee if forbid to press,
In freedom's plain and anti-courtier's dress,
Light of her rhimes as of petitions made,
Should they be lost, forgotten or mislaid,
If not so vain to think thou shouldst commend,
In either case permit me to defend.
Too well I know imputed as a crime
The gift of reason to the man of rhime;
To childish
Fiction
gingling numbers tied,
As bells that dangle by its infant side;
To useless whims poetick worth confin'd,
To strike the sense but not improve the mind.
Should on the daring verse, then, censure fall,
From priest or prelate, waken'd in the stall;
Or should the learned jurors take in hand
To burn the books they may not understand;
Scorn'd the loud torrent of the mob's abuse,
With thee I leave my errour and excuse.
Know then, my patron, once upon a time,
While yet a boy, I caught the itch of rhime:
But, born with hatred to the sing-song train,
Whose numbers charm, like empty notes, in vain,
While strange to themes t' employ the muse about,
The peccant humour broke but little out;
Till late, in waking dreams that trouble youth,
On one side
prudence
urg'd, on t'other
truth:
Prudence,
a worldly-minded dame, and sly,
Who fix'd on earth still kept her cautious eye;
While
truth,
whose open breast did mine inflame,
Look'd up to Heav'n; to heav'n, from whence she came.
When now my eager heart her pow'r confess'd,
And thus her willing captive
truth
address'd.
"Art thou, my friend, that enterprizing youth
"Who make pretensions to the song of truth;
"By reason taught to leave, in early life,
"The wanton mistress, for the faithful wife?
"Among the sciences thy subject chuse.
"Philosophy's
the sister of the
muse.
Prudence,
who heard, made various hems and haws;
And, after due, deliberating pause,
Shaking her head, "beware rash youth," she cried,
"Let prudence here your early footsteps guide.
"Art thou so ignorant as not to know
"Truth leads us oft to poverty and woe?
"Let me advise—wouldst thou succeed in rhime?
"Mark, at the proper season, well thy time;
"Taking this maxim as a gen'ral rule,
"The knave is honest till he plays the fool:
"For times there are of such malignant face,
"That sharpers only rise to pow'r and place;
"Times, when the mere huzza for publick good
"Breaks down all ranks of honour and of blood;
"When sacred characters like bawds are us'd,
"And princes with impunity abus'd:
"The throne of majesty a vulgar thing;
"While
George,
the cobler, damns great GEORGE, the king.
"In times like these, behold on ev'ry side
"What pains we take offensive truth to hide:
"Asham'd to show her bashful face at court,
"See her simplicity the mob's rude sport;
"Her lovers stigmatiz'd by gen'ral hate,
"As bold disturbers of the church and state.
"Wouldst thou to this abandon'd tribe belong?
"What bard e'er heeded yet the TRUTH of
song!
"Again, 'tis certain there may come a time,
"When impudence finds no excuse in rhime;
"When even prudence may herself be just;
"Her int'rest more to keep than break her trust;
"When crowns are honour'd, and, in proper season,
"
Sh-bb-re,
dread patriot, may be hang'd for treason:
"A time, perhaps (years work the strangest things)
"When the brave
Scots
may love their best of kings;
"When slighted science may approach the throne;
"And
Britons
make true policy their own.
"What tho' their
patriot
hearts are known to fail,
"When dearth of barley threatens want of
ale
"What tho'
religion,
arm'd by common-sense,
"Breaks but its weapons in its own defence;
"Ev'n yet may
piety
be kept alive,
"And half expiring
patriotism
revive.
"At such a season, should the muse inspire,
"If touch'd with caution, mayst thou strike the lyre,
"Perhaps uncensur'd; but to look for praise!
"Know these, young bard, are no poetick days.
"But should the
age,
as probably it may,
"Turn its loose politicks another way;
"While, in religious mood, far push'd the schemes
"Of true born
Britons,
always in extremes,
"The times may yet return when frantick
zeal
"Shall give its wooden sword an edge of steel;
"When
convocations
shall in judgment sit,
"To canvass th' infidelity of
wit;
"On wicked KNOWLEDGE
Britain
's guilt to lay,
"And drive the destin'd victim far away.
"O, thus if
ignorance
should rule, in turn,
"Bards
lose their ears, and martyr
theists
burn;
"Ready reforming constables, at hand,
"Of
scientifick
vice to cleanse the land;
"Have thou with truth nor morals aught to do.
"Things are not always
fit
that may be
true."
Here
Prudence
ended—her advice was good:
But
Truth
had charms that could not be with stood.
Hers then the muse—how far success will show
In times like ours her song be
à propos.
So much indeed of
prudence
did I learn,
My fingers ne'er in politicks to burn.
Silent I sat, amidst the party rout,
When late the ministry turn'd in and out;
When rag'd the furious goose-quills of the times,
To shame their country with their shameless rhimes.
Careless what turtle-eating son of
White
's
Might set the blunders of the state to rights,
If
Pollio, Gallus, Tully,
or
his grace,
Should all keep out, or who get into place.
I car'd not, I, tho' these, or none of these,
The king, the house, or mightier
mob
might please.
Blam'd I the peer, whom adverse winds had blown
Round the wide world, to prop a monarch's throne;
Taught, in the hurricanes of southern seas,
The statesman's wisdom and the courtier's ease;
By plunder'd
Spaniards,
the consummate skill
To steer a kingdom, like a bark, at will?
Tho' made too plain the lee-way of the realm,
Did I presume to bid him mind the helm?
Nay, when the guardian
genii
of the land
To save our desp'rate fortunes took in hand;
I sung them not, tho' crown'd, by half the nation,
With civick wreaths, from town and corporation.
I ne'er, officious, crack'd my brains t'amend
Errours, the
great
alone might comprehend;
Plagu'd, with no songs of praise, our Lord the King;
Nor gave one faggot to the blaze of
Byng:
But, free from panegyrick as abuse,
Put all my little wit to private use.
Thus far of
temp'ral
politicks I'm clear;
Nor has the
spiritual
had more to fear.
Since gospel
witnesses
in form were tried,
Their valid evidence I ne'er denied;
Ne'er intermeddled with the jury's quest,
Nor contradicted
Littleton
or
West.
When
church
and
state
learn'd
Warburton
would join,
Tho' sad th'affair, I made it none of mine:
Nor did I e'er, 'gainst
Leland
's pen, presume
To vindicate
Lord Bolingbroke
or
Hume:
Made no pretence to freedom of debate;
Nor risk'd, like harmless —n—t,
Woolston
's fate.
And tho' for once, in this, a trick of youth,
Prudential views are sacrific'd to truth;
Could I shake off those vices
rhime
and
sense;
This
first
might likely prove my
last
offence;
Or, in thy cause enlisted once my pen,
I never more might trouble
truth
agen:
But to thy purpose turn my ready hand,
True to the
law
and
gospel
of the land.
ADVERTISEMENT.
THE ground work of the following Epistles being the fruit of a private correspondence, it was found necessary, in preparing them for the press; to adapt them to more general use and amusement. It may not, therefore, be improper to observe that, whatever theological subjects have fallen in the author's way, he hath purposely avoided taking part with divines of any sect or party: leaving it to the ingenuous, of every persuasion, to determine how far their particular sentiments may be supported by authorities, superior to common-sense and simple demonstration. — As to his poetry; having no reputation to lose, he is little anxious about what he may acquire. Indeed, it must be confess'd that perspicuity and argument have been frequently consulted, at the expence both of the dignity and harmony of his numbers, Elegance, however, would have been more attended to, had the author's leisure permitted; or, had his design been to distinguish himself as a
poet;
a character he is much less ambitious of than that of a
philosopher.
—
Unmov'd by sophistry, unaw'd by name,
No dupe to doctrines, and no fool to fame.
CONTENTS.
EPISTLE THE FIRST —
Page
5—42
OF
truth
in general.
Its criterion.
Its relation to
opinion.
The uncertainty of the latter.
Necessary that both should concur in Science.
EPISTLE THE SECOND —
page
47—88
On Science, as our guide to truth.
The criterion best adapted to the opinion of individuals.
The absurdity of persecution.
Our pretensions to divine, and the bounds of human knowledge.
EPISTLE THE THIRD —
page
93—126
On the infatuation of mankind, respecting paradox and mysteries.
The effects and causes of such infatuation.
The absurdity of supposing ignorance and folly the means to promote the cause of truth; or that the freedom of scientifick inquiry is incompatible with the political welfare of society.
EPISTLE THE FOURTH —
Page
131—154
On the weakness of the human understanding
The abstract existence of the Deity
The incomprehensibility of the divine nature, and the incongruity of pretended atheism.
EPISTLE THE FIFTH —
page
159—202
On happiness.
The apparent incapacity of mankind for its enjoyment.
The comparative pain and pleasure of human sensations; and their relation to our physical and moral constitution.
EPISTLE THE SIXTH —
page
209—256
On abstract good and evil.
The physical perfection of the material universe, and the moral harmony observable in the dispensations of Providence.
EPISTLE THE SEVENTH —
page
263—298
On moral principles
The respective influence of
reason
and the
passions
The immorality of
ignorance
and the indispensable duty of seeking
knowledge.
EPISTLE THE EIGHTH —
page
303—336
On the immortality of the soul; and the arments for, and against, a future state.
EPISTLE THE
FIRST.
ARGUMENT.
Of
truth
in general. —Its criterion. —Its relation to
opinion.
—The uncertainty of the latter. — Necessary that both should concur in Science.
SUMMARY.
UNiversal belief being, in fact, an undisputed criterion of truth, and all mankind necessarily believing those positions which they conceive demonstrable; science, or demonstrative knowledge, is supposed to be the least exceptionable test of what is true or false, in general. —The abstract certitude of the schools is, therefore, exploded. But, as particular opinions are not always the effect of knowledge, nor are systems constantly founded on scientifick principles, it is inquired if there be no other criterion, sufficiently obvious to relieve the doubts and reconcile the opposite sentiments of mankind. —The dispensations of providence, as well as the dictates of revelation, appear inadequate to the purpose; theologists being found too unsucceessful, in clearing up the sacred page, and phisiologists too ignorant of the system of nature, for either to form opinions, equally adapted to the credulity of individuals. —Divines and philosophers are censured, indeed, rather as, mercenary wranglers, or bigots to particular systems, than fair inquirers after, or teachers of, the truth. —A fair and ingenuous inquirer characteriz'd. —Such not frequently to be found; few being capacitated for so arduous a task. —Fortitude and moderation the grand requisites: the scarcity of which in the minds of men, in general, serves to account for their want of success in the attempt; as well as for their promptitude either to embrace skepticism, as an antidote to errour, or conformity, to avoid the trouble of thinking. —Dogmatists and Skepticks censured: The former on account of their absurd dependance on tradition and futile authorities: the latter for superciliously rejecting, on the other hand, all authority and tradition, without distinction. —In our inquiries after truth, however, our belief is to be suspended in regard to points beyond our knowledge. —In scientifick researches, also, the subtilty of metaphysical arguments should be with caution trusted, as insensibly leading us into errour and perplexity.
EPISTLE THE
FIRST.
WHILE zeal, beyond the grave, pursues
Whom priest and patriot abuse,
With some the foster-sire of lies,
Extoll'd by others to the skies,
St.
John
The late Lord Viscount
Bolingbroke.
, thus sav'd and damn'd by fame,
An honour'd and a blasted name!
Lorenzo
asks, ingenuous youth,
What is, and who believes, the truth.
The truth my friend, wouldst learn of me?
'Tis that wherein mankind agree.
At least no safer truth we know
Than that the world will grant us so.
"But when and where?" —the sages tell,
Of yore 'twas buried in a well,
A trite saying of
Democritus.
So deep, that hid, for want of light,
From ev'ry peeping mortal's sight,
The more suspicious than the rest
Conceiv'd the story was a jest;
And, as no soul could find it out,
That truth itself was all a doubt.
Philosophizing train of thought!
Since by improving moderns caught;
Who tell us nature trick'd mankind,
When giving eyes she left us blind:
Heav'n making fools, and thinking fit
We know not, says
Descartes,
whether God hath not created us in such a manner, that we are constantly deceiv'd, even as to things the most palpable and evident.
To play upon their want of wit.
But sure we boldly may receive
As truth what all mankind believe:
Such universal faith a guide
In skepticism itself implied.
"Yet say in what the world unite,
"Else useless this our rule of right;
"Else still inquiry's at a pause;
"Still vague investigation's laws."
Lorenzo,
all, with you and me,
In points demonstrable agree:
Conviction, right, or wrong, the test
As the suppos'd demonstration may be either false or true: it being sufficient, to our argument, that all mankind agree to call that
truth
which but appears to be demonstrated.
Of truth in ev'ry human breast:
While truths, demonstratively so,
Who once believe profess to
know.
On
Science
hence our search must rest;
That universal rule confess'd.
Laid then those subtilties aside
Where human certitude's denied,
Inquiry safely may proceed
To form its scientifick creed.
Doth
Solomon
himself profess
His science all uncertain guess,
Forc'd by reflective reason, I confess, That human science is uncertain guess. PRIOR's
Solomon.
Th'egregious sophister affirms
A contradiction, ev'n in terms.
Who can his ignorance suppose
Of that he's conscious that he knows?
Or, according to
Monsieur Huet,
if we do not allow
that
to be evident which actually appears so, truth and falsehood are equally demonstrable: and we may add, knowledge and ignorance synonymous terms.
Sayst thou slow knowledge faith outflies;
Believers spurning at the wise;
Opinion, wing'd, feet, hand and head,
In haste, without her errand, sped;
Or driv'n, inactive, here and there,
With ev'ry vagrant breath of air.
Wouldst, therefore, know what systems err,
To whom opinions to refer,
Where trembling doubt and errour blind
At once a guard and guide may find;
At once successfully apply,
And give to falshood's face the lie?
No sect, alas! profess the rule
That reconciles the knave and fool;
Unites the ignorant and wise:
Revering these what those despise.
Whether from nature's general law
The outlines of our creed we draw,
Or think the truth be only given
In revelation pure from Heaven,
It matters not; unless we find
Some active index in the mind,
Some ray of Heaven's unerring light,
To point, or here or there, aright.
Let
Christianity
display
Its wond'rous volume to the day;
The sacred lines, however true,
Alike affect not me and you:
Th' accepted sense of holy writ
Still resting on th' accepting wit.
For who that read but comprehend
As taught by father, priest or friend,
Or tenets new, more nice than wise,
Peculiar to themselves, devise.
How then prevails the sacred text,
If by the comment thus perplex'd;
If hereticks, of ev'ry kind,
Their tenets in the gospel find;
If thus the spirit hide the flaw
That mars the letter of the law!
Let
Nature
's striking scenes engage
The letter'd and unletter'd age;
Various as ev'ry varied tribe
The notions hence the world imbibe.
When meteors glow and comets blaze,
How wond'ring ignorance doth gaze;
Foretelling, ev'n in errour wise,
The judgments gath'ring in the skies!
Th'
aurora
Borealis.
streaming from the pole,
What groundless fear sthe weak control
Hear them address their angry God,
And take his mercies for his rod:
Whilst thine, or
Bradley's
curious, eyes
As calmly view the threat'ning skies,
The plagues, the famines, wars they yield,
As
Colin
drives his team a-field.
Rolls the big thunder o'er the plain,
Melt the fierce light'nings clouds to rain,
Ah me! how impious,
Crito
cries,
To lift thy hand against the skies;
Thy lines of magick steel to form,
To brave the fury of the storm;
With
Franklin,
B. Franklin,
Esq
of
Philadelphia.
madly to defy
The thunderer's red right-arm, on high,
Bold
Titan!
to erect thy stand
To wrest the light'nings from his hand!
Alluding to the manner of preventing the damage apprehended from thunder-clouds, discover'd by our late improvements in electricity.
Yet those in physicks better read
At honest
Crito
shake the head;
In pity, or derision, smile;
Nature and truth their guard the while.
Thus, by unlike experience taught,
Peculiar are our modes of thought;
Explain'd, by Custom's partial nod,
The voice of nature and of God.
Dost thou apply to saint or sage,
The guides of each believing age,
The truths, which mysteries conceal,
Or those of science to reveal?
From far and near, what tales absurd
Adulterate the written word!
How oft the pure, and perfect, text
Have base Theologists perplex'd!
What transcripts! what interpolation!
Eternal source of disputation!
Alas,
Lorenzo,
few believe,
In fact, the doctrines they receive.
How few of ev'n the reverend tribe
The very canons they subscribe!
Do such their mother-church defend?
On her pluralities depend:
The mitre and the sine-cure
Preserving best her tenets pure.
For, rob the priesthood of its gain,
What pillar will the church sustain.
What cement binds the crazy wall,
Whose sapt foundation threats its fall.
Do
such
profess to turn the key
On myst'ries, hid from you and me;
Or of the oracles of old
The dubious phrases to unfold;
To teach the truth to vulgar minds,
Which Heav'n's own blaze of rhetorick blinds?
Ah, think not these will e'er display
Their secrets to the eye of day.
Tell me what artist will impart
To thee th' arcanum of his art.
Not one—but all, reserv'd and sly,
Affect to cheat th' observer's eye:
Their slightest knacks important made,
To raise the wonder of their trade.
Thus oft the reverend tiro, taught
That none may serve their God for naught,
Casts o'er his ignorance a veil,
Or masks the moral of his tale;
Securely laughing in his sleeve,
When fools the tale itself believe.
To save his calling from abuse
His caution here, in fact, of use.
For once his art and mist'ry
Mistery
not
Mystery.
See
Johnson
's Dict, fol. edit.
known
Who church-authority would own?
As, when sublime conundrums hit,
We laugh to scorn the quibbler's wit;
So, in rever'd enigmas wise,
His riddling reverence we despise.
Sayst thou, since reformation's hand
From spiritual slav'ry freed the land,
The sacerdotal hydra chain'd,
By truth opinions are restrain'd?
Look round, believing friend, and see
How pious Protestants agree.
In what less fickle do we find
The daughter's than the mother's mind!
For know th' abandon'd scarlet whore
The church of
Rome
— of which all the reform'd churches may be call'd the descendants: at least, so far as they usurp an ecclesiastical authority and require implicit obedience: in which light only, such presumption being destructive of their institution as seminaries of truth and religion, they are censur'd in the text.
Our present alma-mater bore;
Whose beauty, modesty and truth
Were all debauch'd in early youth,
While in seraglio, close confin'd,
Sly priests conceal'd her from mankind.
And tho', when zeal to hide her sin
Had almost stript her to the skin;
To skreen her batter'd charms from shame,
She laid to truth her artful claim;
Yet, once secure, the cunning jade
Gave up its temporary aid;
Playing again her mother's game
With priests of ev'ry church the same.
As the word priest is not frequently us'd in common discourse to signifie a Protestant divine, so neither hath it here such an indiscriminate implication; meaning such only as lay claim to that title by their maintaining the tenets of church-authority, and their endeavours rather to keep the world in ignorance than to diffuse the knowledge of the truth.
For tho', in pure excess of grace,
Miss perk'd it in her mother's face,
Her disobedience felt the smart,
When stabb'd her int'rest to the heart.
What tho' she flaunt no longer gay;
Her tawdry trappings cast away;
Her trim simplicity, at best,
Is vanity but sprucely dress'd.
What tho' forbid to patch and paint,
And pass the sinner for a saint,
Yet still the holy dame, afraid
That truth and reason spoil her trade,
Her pulpit-trumpet sounds to arms,
And fills the zealot with alarms.
Awaken'd by her fearful cries,
Behold her doughty champions rise;
Arm'd cap-a-piè each mother's son,
To save their parent, roaring run;
Conscious how greatly to their cost
Might church-authority be lost.
While thus the orthodox in grain,
In spite of fate, their church maintain;
The truth, a term of meaning wide,
To all the priest affirms applied;
No less the het'rodox than they,
From pride or av'rice, go astray:
As motives similar prevail
With those who brew or broach the tale.
Say, else, if self-conviction true
The conscientious
Henley
knew;
Fir'd by a pure religious zeal,
That champion of the publick weal,
For pence, the primacy to slight,
If I would have chang'd my principles for interest, I might have been Archbishop of
Canterbury
before now. HENLEY,
vivâ você.
To jest with ev'ry sacred rite,
To trample, with avow'd design,
On laws both human and divine.
Say what his aim, whose dread rebukes
Craz'd his poor neighbours of
St. Luke's;
St. Luke
's hospital, for lunaticks, in
Moor-Fields,
near the Tabernacle and Foundery.
Who, godly warfare proud to seek,
In suff'rance turns the smitten cheek:
As knavish Jews, to sell their ware,
Abuse and insult tamely bear.
No worldly gain to
Whitfield
yields
The plenteous harvest of
Moor-Fields;
While from the gift of sterling gold,
Like off'rings to the Lord of old,
See
Exod.
ch. 35.
The coatless priest with Aaron vies,
Alluding to their admitting coblers, porters, and beggars as well as regular divines, to the ministry.
And modern
tabernacles
rise?
Or, are fanatick weavers led
Because his vanity is fed;
A tickling transport that he feels,
To find his thousands at his heels;
To hear the
Io poeans
ring,
Due to the hero, saint or king;
Which, ne'ertheless, the mob bestow,
On sainted pick-pockets, below.
If then, by poverty or pride,
The priest and parson led aside;
While these, th' instructors of mankind,
Our ignorance their interest find;
O shun,
Lorenzo,
shun the street
Where disputant theologues meet.
See the wing'd cork, from side to side
Rebound, the truant school-boy's pride,
With equal warmth, with equal noise,
So these, by turns, like truant boys,
Between what saint or father saith,
Bang the light shittle-cock of faith.
But hark! what jargon strikes our ear?
What hebrew madmen have we here?
What pen the frenzy shall describe
Of
Hutchinson
's or
Behmen
's tribe;
Two of the most incomprehensible writers that ever reflected scandal on the science of divinity.
Who, scorning reason's vain pretence,
Make war, a dire croisade, on sense?
If reason, then, reprizals make,
At once their cause and them forsake,
What wonder? yet, in truth, 'twere well
Might
Bedlam
spare one vacant cell;
Since no good christian, yet, for
Law,
The Reverend Mr.
William Law
—a writer little inferiour to
Bebmen
himself.
Hath strown his darken'd room with straw.
Theologists so prone to err,
Dost thou philosophers prefer?
These oft, an interested sect,
Like poverty or pride affect.
Logicians,
casuists by trade,
At random draw their furious blade;
Taking, in gladiatorial pride,
The cudgels up on either side.
To them indiff'rent wrong or right;
Swiss
champions! theirs the task to fight:
And share, with venal art, the prey;
The golden gettings of the day.
So
Broughton
's
A famous boxer.
heroes
bruis'd
and bled,
At once for honour and for bread:
And
Powel
's
An eminent toad-eater.
virtuous thirst of fame
Inur'd his iron lips to flame.
The
learn'd,
prodigious wise indeed
The man by Heav'n inspir'd to
read!
Affecting merely to decide,
Indulge their magisterial pride,
And, deigning scarce on sense a look,
Profoundly dogmatize by book:
Save here those champions of the gown,
Meek
A fine genius and polite critick.
Warburton
and modest
Brown.
A most exemplary divine and patriot.
To real merit ne'er allied
The
pedant's,
or the
parson's
pride,
By singularity of taste
Good sense and lit'rature disgrac'd,
See wrangling
Sophisters,
intent
On cross-grain'd paradoxes bent;
As if to truth they made pretence
By wand'ring but from common-sense.
Among the witty and the wise,
Hence oft in words their difference lies;
While empty terms, for years, engage
The scholar's and the skeptick's rage:
Till, wearied out, they stare to see
In fact how nearly all agree.
So, poiz'd between two empty scales,
Now here, now there, the beam prevails,
That, as their false vibrations cease,
In equilibrio rests in peace.
Nor seldom, when in fact dissent
These slashing sons of argument,
The
subject-matter
in debate
Beneath the pains t'investigate.
Philosophy at
Arthur
's
An academy well known to students in the politer sciences of
pitting, betting
and
whist.
taught,
So
Bond
and
Brag,
disputing, fought,
Whether as near, from
Change
to
Kew,
Brundisium minuci melius via ducat, an Appi.
HOR.
To cross the old bridge or the new.
"Could neither wheel nor chain decide?"
Alas, my friend, they never tried.
For neither of these learned youth
Car'd one brass farthing for the truth:
But each, to make his judgment out,
Would drive full-speed ten miles about.
The
first-philosophy
A term in vogue, given, by way of eminence, to the philosophy of the present age.
in use
Thus argumentative abuse:
While truth and falsehood, right and wrong,
Serve as the burthen of a song:
With sophists, as with scolding wives,
Quarrel the business of their lives.
Leave then;
Lorenzo,
vain dispute.
Empty the triumph to confute.
Nor those for truth's defenders take,
Who cavil but for cavil's sake.
But is there, lay-man or divine,
In whom good sense and temper join;
A priest of honest
The late Bishop of
Clogher;
an honour to his profession, as well as to the age and country in which he liv'd.
Clogher
's mould,
Or theist moderate as bold,
To whom indulgent Heav'n assign'd
A truly ethick turn of mind;
Who dares the mob in scorn to hold;
Hath weigh'd the happiness of gold;
Hath found the pond'rous cheat so light,
That avarice gets nothing by't;
Who rates the value of a name
From th' insignificance of same;
Not vainly seeking more to know
Than God, has giv'n to man, below;
Yet, wheresoe'er display'd her charms,
Embracing truth with open arms.
On such
Lorenzo
may depend,
For guide, philosopher and friend.
"But where such friend and guide" you cry.
Knowst thou no such? alas, nor I.
For O, the truth, in fact, how few
Have pow'r or talents, to pursue.
Alike th' abilities unfit
Of pedant dull or sprightly wit,
Of captious criticks, scholiasts vain,
Of ev'ry superficial brain.
Indeed too oft ev'n genius gains
Its labour only for its, pains:
Immortal bards not seldom here,
Dupes, from their mother's milk, to fear.
Tho' smoothly run the hackney'd lay
Along the beaten, moral way;
Should truth on custom turn its back,
Or deviate from the vulgar track,
Like crabs, with retrogressive feet,
Such temporizing bards retreat;
Humming, their credit to maintain,
To worn-out tunes th' old catch again.
Ev'n thus thy fav'rite bard retir'd,
Whom ev'ry muse at once inspir'd,
Whose strains immortalize the guide.
His scholiast piously decried,
Thy
Pope,
who, like a forward child,
In leading-strings, ran bold and wild;
But, fearful of himself to stand,
Seiz'd his old, tottering mother's hand.
The church of
Rome,
to which Mr.
Pope
return'd, after having written his
essay
on
man:
for, that he was a true roman-catholick at the time of his writing that essay is a tale, adapted merely to the credulity and ignorance of a
Racine.
Unless indeed we have as little opinion of his judgment as his friend
Bolingbroke
had: who is said to have ridicul'd him as one who understood nothing of his own principles, nor saw to what they naturally led.
Look back,
Lorenzo,
never thou,
When set thy hand unto the plough.
In vain we sacrifice to truth
The sportive giddiness of youth,
If falshood's painted charms engage
The doting levity of age.
Truth's thorny paths who fear to run,
Should e'er her dang'rous portal shun:
Nor set like heroes boldly out,
To founder in the deeps of doubt.
Yet ne'er forget—tho' boldness thine,
Temp'rance that boldness must refine.
True temp'rance, rational and brave;
To stoick pride no sullen slave:
Not such as, gently meek and mild,
Betrays the weakness of a child;
Nor that, without or fear or wit,
By chance, ev'n blunderers may get.
The
rash,
too angry to be bold,
By falshood oft are bought and sold.
The
proud,
too haughty to be wise,
See not where grov'ling errour lies.
The
heedless
counts without his host,
Or runs his nose against the post:
And oft their tim'rous indolence
The
meek
indulge, at truth's expence.
So hard to keep that middle way,
From which inquiry ne'er should stary;
While, for the task, as hard to find
A truly firm, capacious mind;
No wonder fools, the would-be-wise,
Suppose in doubt that wisdom lies:
Or that, because so short their sight,
Truth may be errour, wrong be right.
Cicero
somewhere observes, there is no opinion, however absurd, which has not been espous'd by some or other of the philosophers. And nothing surely can be more so than the famous inserence drawn from the weakness of the human understanding,
i. e.
that, because we do not comprehend ev'ry thing, we in reality, know nothing.
Agrippa,
it is true, has declaim'd prettily, and the ingenious Bishop of
Avranches
chopp'd logick as dextrously on the subject. Yet, alas, such is the perverseness of common-sense that the greatest part of mankind, even to this day, do insist on the certainty of their knowing the right hand from the left.
For ignorance, to sooth its pride,
Must seek its own defects to hide.
Affecting, hence, all unbelief,
Is
Scoto
infidel in chief;
His hand and heart, his ears and eyes
Confessing what his tongue denies?
To truth in ev'ry system blind,
Yet seeking it where none shall find;
Lorenzo,
here his wit a cheat,
That mocks his judgment with deceit.
Where'er opinion gaily dress'd,
Runs gadding in her rainbow vest,
Among her sisterhood, a crew
Of motley wives black, red or blue;
See skeptick faith, the truth in chase,
Run giddily, from face to face;
Now this, now that, by turns, enjoy;
Nor find them false till found to cloy.
Thus, with the fair he most admires,
Full soon the wav'ring lover tires.
At morn, her smiles with joy he meets;
At night, affronts her in the streets;
By loose suspicion wand'ring led,
Or spider fancy's flimsy thread;
Till, on some lying whore, at last,
He lights, and holds her dogmas fast.
Oppos'd to these, nor strange to find,
In uniformity combin'd,
Believing thousands; who suppose
Truth with a mob for ever goes:
As if convinc'd the rabble rout,
Because too obstinate to doubt.
Yet customs old or fashions new
Are all th' unthinking herd pursue.
The orthodox in dress and song
As modish as to right and wrong.
Whatever country you go into, let the religion be what it will, the unthinking part thereof are always the reputed orthodox. DED.
to Essay on
SPIRIT.
Of custom born, to fashion bred,
Thus blind credulity is led:
While modes of faith, like modes of dress,
Mankind capriciously profess.
Yet all agreed, through shame or pride,
Nature's simplicity to hide,
Whate'er the fashion of the time,
It holds the naked truth a crime.
Thus, to a man, we find the crowd,
To doubt too bashful, or too proud,
In errour rather chuse to fall,
Than boast no scheme of faith at all.
Impatient, hence, of stop or stay,
They blunder on the broadest way;
Or make a guide, in ev'ry street,
Of fool or knave, the first they meet.
Authorities how blind and lame
Hence bring the credulous to shame;
While all revere the mould'ring page,
Where moths have spent their gothick rage.
Tales half destroy'd, the rest so true!
So much inspir'd the Lord-knows-who!
There is nothing so contemptible, says
Glanville,
but antiquity can render it august and excellent.
Couldst thou,
Lorenzo,
build thy hopes.
On muftis, patriarchs or popes;
On names implicitly depend,
And mere authorities defend?
Split on this rock, mistaken youth,
Lost were thy voyage to the truth:
'Twere best to give thy labour o'er,
Nor urge in vain thy genius more.
Lorenzo,
credit not too soon
Fine tales and tidings from the moon:
Nor, howsoever learn'd or just;
In priest or prophet put thy trust.
By
Paul
or by
Apollos
taught,
Still to one test their tenets brought,
Their doctrines, howsoever true,
Adopt not till they're so to you.
For oft, when stript of its disguise,
Folly the wisdom of the wise.
Yet superciliously reject
No dogmas that the world respect.
'Gainst such too rashly ne'er inveigh;
Nor cast thy grandsire's wit away.
Disdaining at the lamp to pore,
That lights us to the classick lore,
The half-taught deist thus exclaims
At texts rever'd and hallow'd names,
Damning profane or sacred writ,
That squares not with his shallow wit.
But while, through ignorance or pride,
Opinions thus the world divide;
Faith made the priest's and statesman's tool;
By turns while truth and falshood rule,
Or, with some temporizing view,
Nonsense, that's neither false nor true;
Canst thou, at ease in doubt, my friend,
On points too dark thy faith suspend?
Canst thou the world's esteem forego;
And burns thy bosom but to know?
Is truth thy only creed profess'd?
Canst leave to providence the rest?
Throw partial systems all aside,
And take thy knowledge for thy guide.
See where the stream of Science flows
From nature's fountain, whence it rose;
Through hills and dales meand'ring led,
As clear as at the fountain head.
Stand thou not shiv'ring on the brink,
Once well embark'd thou canst not sink:
Nor can the current falsely guide,
While reason's banks inclose the tide;
Whence truth, in sight, on either hand,
Smiles on thy voyage through the land.
But, O, with caution, hoist thy sail,
To court the metaphysick gale;
Lest, hurried on, thy heedless youth
Should lose, with land, the sight of truth:
Turn'd forth adrift, thy lot to take,
On errour's broad unfathom'd lake;
'Mong struck leviathans, in vain,
To plunge and flounder through the main:
Where tides nor set, nor currents steer;
But winds all round the compass veer;
While floating isles, that cheat the sight,
To faithless anchorage invite:
Hobbes, St. John, Hume
and hundreds more,
Rich barks! all wreck'd upon the shore.
EPISTLE THE
SECOND.
ARGUMENT.
On Science, as our guide to truth—The criterion best adapted to the opinion of individuals— The absurdity of persecution—Our pretensions to divine, and the bounds of human knowledge.
SUMMARY
SCience, though admitted as the rule of faith in matters relating to the investigation of truth, is neither exclusive nor universal, affecting only our opinion in speculative points. For, however refin'd are our
credenda,
we insensibly join, in our practical notions, with the rest of mankind. —Whatever objection, therefore, scientifick inquirers may make to the systems of others, none can be made to their fixing the criterion of truth on knowledge: the certainty of which is, by implication, admitted in the general pretensions of mankind to
common-sense.
—This is the privilege of ev'ry mind, without distinction; enabling us equally to draw like conclusions from like premises. —All actual dispute, therefore, arises from some misunderstanding, or different acceptation, of the matter in question: as the most ignorant peasant is equally certain of the proofs he comprehends with the greatest philosopher. —For the same reason, nevertheless, those would be engag'd in a desperate undertaking, who should attempt to reconcile mankind to any one system of opinion; the capacity and credulity of individuals being so very different, in consequence of their diversity of temperament, education and experience. —It is injurious and ridiculous, therefore, to insult others, for thinking in the manner we ourselves should have done, under the same circumstances. —It is still more absurd to reprobate the rest of mankind for not believing what we ourselves do not, nor can possibly be made to, believe: as is the case when we would impose tenets, that either contradict themselves, or are, in fact, downright nonsense—For it is impossible to believe apparent falshood, or to be convinc'd of any thing, by a set of words, that convey no determinate meaning—Mysterious or unintelligible propositions cannot, therefore, be believ'd—If the truth of revelation, in general, be admitted, as what is reveal'd from Heaven must undoubtedly be true, the difficulty of knowing what is particularly so, or who are the truly inspir'd, is yet inexplicably great. —Tho' the power of working miracles also be allow'd a proof of inspiration, in the agent; the fallacy of pretended ones, and the suppos'd inspiration of impostors, are almost invincible obstacles to our discovery of the truth. —The supposition, also, that real miracles are transgressions of the laws of nature is not at all necessary to support their veracity; but argues the contrary; and implies an injurious reflection on the omnipotence and prescience of the Deity. —Whatever reasonable objections, however, we may have against putting implicit faith in either pretended miracles or revelation; yet as the utmost extent of scientifick discovery falls so infinitely short of a perfect knowledge of the designs and operations of Nature; we cannot philosophically deny that God sometimes produces effects, for ends best known to himself, by means wholly unknown to us. —To proceed, nevertheless, in our inquiries on the most certain grounds, the criterion of Science is to be neglected only in points indisputably and intelligibly reveal'd.
EPISTLE THE
SECOND.
NOR to the fount of
Hippocrene,
Nor groves of laurel ever green,
Nor where the wanton graces stray,
With flow'rs is strown the muse's way.
Lorenzo,
no, I more rejoice
At reason's bold, and manly, voice
Than at the softest, sprightliest air
Mirth ever sung to lighten care:
Truth's sober tale more pleas'd to hear
Than all that tickle fancy's ear;
Tho' such, to babbling echo sweet,
Aloud the publick voice repeat.
Our numbers, then, let truth excuse,
If rudely sing th' unpolish'd muse;
Careless of ornament, and proud
To differ from the sing-song crowd,
So boastful of their poor pretence
To swell with sound their starveling sense.
Truth hopes not for poetick praise:
To fiction sacred are the bays.
Dost thou,
Lorenzo,
still demur:
So fearful in thy search to err,
If plac'd thy faith on points alone
Whose truth demonstratively known;
These much too few, and too confin'd,
To serve the purpose of mankind.
Let a trite moral here advise.
"Be not more credulous than wise."
Whatever doubts thy course impede,
Seek not to amplify thy creed,
By myst'ries dark or dogmas old,
Because to son from father told;
Severely to known truth confin'd,
Of little faith were all mankind.
Thy present, arduous task, my friend,
No vague determinations end.
Of practice speculation wide,
Demands for thee a surer guide,
If in the former prone to stray,
The justling world oppose our way:
While, in the last, are thousands flown
Past the world's knowledge or their own.
"But hath this scientifick choice
"The suffrage of the general voice:
"The means consistent with the end;
"That truth which you, yourself, commend?
See the begining of the first
Epistle.
Lorenzo,
see to common-sense
By common-sense is not meant any set of principles, or method of logicizing established by custom. But an innate capacity in all mankind to reason, or draw conclusions, from what they hear and see.
How just, how gen'ral the pretence.
To nation, climate, age or sect,
Unlimited without respect:
Whence, howsoever wide we stray,
When church, or system, lead the way,
All, of necessity, agree
In what, alike, they hear and see.
For not a son of
Adam
's race
Innate conviction can efface
The highland loon, the lowland lout,
Wild
Irish
fierce, and
Cambrian
stout,
The boor that
Rhynland
's polder drains,
Tho' reason slumber in his brains,
All, all, like premises in view,
Premises not only alike in terms, but whose terms are alike understood.
The like conclusions ever drew.
For know that like our mother earth
Its human offspring, at its birth.
Where fertile clay and barren sand
Compose the variegated land,
Th' unequal strata of the soil
Unequally demand our toil:
The rich that toil with gain repay;
Thrown on the poor our pains away.
In man's uncultivated mind
So varied is the soil, in kind.
The flow'rs of science, fresh and fair,
On some expand, without our care;
On others scarce, by culture, grow
The buds, that wither as they blow.
Yet here essentially allied,
However else diversified.
The fertile marl, the steril sand
Alike the seed or plant, demand:
Denied no more spontaneous grain
To
Bergen
's rocks than
Baioe
's plain
The country near
Baioe,
celebrated by
Pliny
and others, as the most fruitful part of
Italy, Nullus in orbe locus,
says
Horace, Baiis praelucet amoenis.
Agreeable to the above sentiment, it is at present called
Terra di Lavoro
So, not a truth innate our own,
Tho' we have not, all, by nature, an equal capacity to acquire knowledge, our minds may, nevertheless, be justly consider'd as originally
tabuloe rasoe;
in which there may be a very essential difference, however, as to their aptitude for impression.
The seeds of knowledge must be sown.
Experience slow must swell the root,
And tend the fibres as they shoot;
Or speedier aid instruction grant,
And slips of foreign growth implant.
The mental and material claim
Here too essentially the same:
Grow seed or plant where'er it will
In kind 'tis propagated still.
No soil nor climate can produce
In tares the barley's potent juice:
To thorns no culture can assign
The purple honours of the vine.
Thus when, by simple nature's aid,
Put forth sensation's tender blade;
If, to perfection nearer brought,
It bloom and ripen into thought,
Wherever situate the root;
The same its intellectual fruit.
Its taste, its form, perhaps, we blame,
But still its genus is the same:
In this no poverty of soil,
No dullness ever mock'd our toil.
If vainly, then, in letter'd pride,
The scholar deep is dignified;
So false, so empty the pretence
Of wits to more than common-sense;
If plain to th' idiot as to you
Th' immediate object of his view;
While ev'n the blockhead truly knows
Far as his little science goes;
Consistent, sure our confidence,
In search of truth, on common-sense:
That gen'ral index to mankind,
See Epistle the first.
To taste and genius unconfin'd;
Pointing in all one common way;
By dullness shorten'd but its ray;
Of wit and knowledge all the end
In length that radius to extend:
In stubborn age, or pliant youth,
Its bearing in the line of truth;
A needle constant to the pole,
Whence beams true faith upon the soul.
Dost thou object "if common-sense
"So plausible an evidence,
"And all mankind of this possess'd,
"That any differ from the rest."
Know thou when honest minds dissent,
Misunderstood their argument:
Diff'rent the premises appear,
Else were the fix'd deduction clear.
Hence half our num'rous quarrels rise.
We see not with each others eyes:
So that precisely all alike
Nor terms, nor things conception strike.
For ev'ry individual draws
His plan by mere perspective laws;
Fix'd to one station, time and place,
In pow'r no full survey to trace;
The
false
mistaking oft for
true,
Observ'd at diff'rent points of view.
So, when to cheat the partial sight,
And prove in mirth that black is white,
With lights dispos'd the shades between,
In folds is spread the artful scene;
Oppos'd, the colours strike the eye,
And he affirms what you deny.
Here
spotless all appears and fair;
Perceiv'd a total blackness
there.
The demonstration of his sight
Who doubts? who knows not black from white?
Thus evidence supports dispute;
Nor one the other can refute.
And yet is common-sense to blame?
The premises were not the same.
Were these alike, tho' say you err,
Both would infallibly concur:
For take each others point of sight,
And set, at once, the matter right.
From the consideration of the different appearances of circumstances and things to different minds, many of the
Academicks
fagaciously concluded there was no criterion, whereby we might distinguish between reality and appearance; truth and falshood. A deduction ridiculous enough. For, in the words of Mr.
Pope,
If black and white blend, soften and unite
A thousand ways; is there no black or white?
Conceive not, then, because we find
One source of truth in ev'ry mind,
We individuals think to see,
At ev'ry time and place, agree.
As well, amidst yon grove of trees
While plays a constant eastern breeze,
Each single spray we hope to find
In one direction, west, reclin'd.
For, tho' to truth alike our claim,
Our taste nor sentiments the same.
For dusky green the jaundic'd eye
Mistakes the clear-blue summer sky;
The distant scene, however bright,
Is darkness to the short of sight;
To loaded ears as whispers still
The clack and thunder of the mill.
Thus lost, as colours on the blind,
On dullness qualities refin'd;
Than musick to the deaf no more,
To ignorance th' abstracted lore.
Hence oft objection calls us out,
To satisfy the blockhead's doubt;
Who not one proof, whereon depends
His sought solution, comprehends:
Tous ceux,
says a certain French author,
qui sont capable de faire des objectons, ne sont pas toujours en etat de comprendre tous les principes, dont depend la resolution de leurs objections.
The tritest arguments, of yore,
In vain repeated o'er and o'er,
Proving how fruitless were the toil,
The jarring world to reconcile.
And yet, as but from time and place
Our sev'ral modes of thought we trace,
Alas! how blindly do we run
Each others heresy to shun;
Our own our glory and our pride,
While curses all the rest betide:
By pious children doom'd their sire,
By sires, their children to hell-fire:
Heirs to salvation's brighter sphere
So strangely damn'd, and damning here!
Thus
Calvin
ignorantly raves
At souls which, therefore,
Luther
saves;
To both denied Lord
Peter
's keys;
Who shuts out hereticks like these.
And yet ev'n those, who boast to feel
Their bosoms burn with christian zeal;
Who dooming mussulmen to hell,
With pride uncharitable swell;
In
Naz'reth
bred, or
Bethle'm
born,
Had laugh'd our Saviour's birth to scorn;
Mere Turks, denounc'd for you and me,
The bitter fruit of
Zacon
's tree
To eat with fiends below: the doom
Of
Anti-Mahomet
and
Rome!
Yet, blind as
Sampson,
when despair
Had sunk his life below his care,
The numbers wanton
Gaza
lost
Destroy'd but at his proper cost,
Half-witted Zeal, of all the test,
Itself condemns among the rest;
For, if requir'd by gracious Heaven
Our service but as knowledge given,
Should I in Pope or Mufti, trust;
For proving to their tenets just,
Your rule to censure me, or mine,
Holds the like condemnation thine.
Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art, that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another thou condemnest thy self.
Yet still more wicked, weak and blind
This reprobating, zeal we find;
When, void of truth, absurd and vain
The tenets zealots thus maintain.
Oh! how ridiculous and odd
That zeal precipitate for God,
So short of knowledge,
I bear them record,
says
ST. PAUL,
of the Jews,
that they have a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge.
that, indeed,
It understands not ev'n its creed.
For know, whate'er the world pretend,
But few believe what they defend.
In modes of faith, tho' falsehood taught,
Nonsense is equally their fault:
Thousands by forms of speech deceiv'd
Ne'er yet by mortal man believ'd;
Creeds penn'd, as said, at Heaven's command,
In terms no soul can understand;
Or such, tho' thunder'd from on high,
That plainly give themselves the lie.
But sure, if words no sense convey,
Faith in their utt'rance dies away;
Nor can a single son of
Eve
Apparent falsehood e'er believe.
A man may perhaps believe a proposition to be true, tho' he cannot conceive how it can possibly be so: but he never can sincerely believe a position that contradicts itself, or is evidently false. —Thus I may believe that one man has rais'd another from the dead, tho' I cannot understand by what means it can possibly be true; but I can never actually believe that
two
are but
one,
and that the same
one
is, at the same time,
two;
because it is a contradiction in terms, and apparently impossible.
Belief no vague declaimer's rant,
No bigot's creed, no sophist's cant;
'Tis not the scripture text to quote;
To get our catechism by rote;
O'er homilies to spend the day;
At midnight, half asleep, to pray;
To chatter matins at the dawn,
Or gabble with the man of lawn:
True faith that consciousness of soul,
That times nor accidents control;
Save those adapted and combin'd
To root conviction from the mind.
For know that neither threats nor blows
Sincere belief can e'er impose.
The monk's hot zeal, the jesuit's skill
Lead not conviction as they will.
Go, turn inquisitor and burn
The hereticks, all round, in turn;
The Turk, refusing to resign
His sensual paradise for thine;
The Indian, that in death pretends
To visit but his former friends;
Unless his faith what you may tell,
Of joys in Heav'n and pains in Hell.
Not one of all the suffering tribe
Thy sentiments per-force imbibe.
Howe'er induc'd by hope or fear,
The mind is no free agent here:
To change their faith beyond the power
Of martyrs at their dying hour.
How idly, then, enthusiasts rave
Of systems, that will damn or save;
Or think true proselytes to gain
By torture, gallows, whip or chain:
Since, ever constant to its cause,
True faith depends on nature's laws;
By nonsense nor caprice misled,
The honest heart and sober head.
How idly wild fanaticks preach,
While ignorant of what they teach.
The spirit ne'er affects the mind,
Unless with th' understanding join'd;
Nor hath the word, if void of sense,
To gospel pow'r the least pretence.
The nonsense of our modern saints is, therefore, equally reprehensible with the affectation of speaking in unknown tongues, so severely censur'd, in the Apostle's first letter to the
Cor.
chap. 14.
Some certain meaning, hence, and plain
A saving faith must needs contain:
If fix'd its object, sure, no less
The sense of terms our creed express:
A parrot, else, if none deceive her,
A sound and orthodox believer;
Convinc'd as much as ever yet
The Athanasian paroquet.
That the
Athanasians
believe
nothing
by the creed they profess, might be perhaps too harsh to say, as we confess that,
after the way which they call heresy,
we believe it ourselves: but that they deceive themselves, in supposing they really believe
what
they say, is, for the above reasons, very evident.
Let not fanaticism deceive.
None can a mystery believe.
That is, a mysterious or non-intelligible proposition; as the real assent, or dissent, of the mind must necessarily succeed some determinate conception of the premises laid down: so that no man can possibly believe a position he does not understand.
Tho' plung'd by zeal in errour deep,
While common-sense lies fast asleep,
Their faith rash bigots strangely boast;
The strongest his who's cheated most;
Who least for truth presumes to search;
But headlong runs into the church.
For, laid thy hand upon thy heart,
The formule of thy creed impart;
Dost thou its substance comprehend?
Lo! all its mystery's at an end.
In spite of their misguiding zeal,
Here to their hearts let all appeal:
Enough if just be their pretence
To honesty and common-sense:
Here rests that umpire of mankind,
Conscience, the God within the mind.
At eastern temples as, of yore,
Without the threshold of the door,
In reverence, did the zealot use
To doff, and leave, his dirty shoes:
Like him, the modern faithful, taught
That reason is a thing of naught,
Lest they should soil the church with doubt,
Their understandings leave without.
For ask who thus in mystery trust,
If
Euclid
's demonstration's just;
If truth the geometrick art,
Or subtile algebra, impart.
Unknowing what precisely meant,
They honestly resuse assent;
Consess they first must comprehend,
Before they credit or contend.
O self condemn'd! O dead to shame!
Have these a conscience void of blame;
Who take no worldly points on trust,
But scruple till they know them just;
Yet their supreme concerns will rest
On tenets half the world contest;
Conviction openly defie,
And with their tongues their hearts belie!
These the true faithful shall we call?
These have, alas, no faith at all.
For, howsoe'er with art they strive
To keep absurdity alive,
Cloath'd in equivocal disguise,
Or garb of truth, their specious lies,
Still common-sense, unrooted out,
Will find a flaw to fix a doubt:
And where one doubt is left behind
No firm belief informs the mind.
Yet is there whose officious zeal
Pretends a consciousness to feel,
A fix'd internal evidence
Of axioms, hid from common-sense;
A stronger testimony given,
By inspiration breath'd from Heaven?
Lorenzo,
neither you, nor I,
What God reveals can e'er deny.
But here how needful to be wise
To know where revelation lies.
Art thou thyself inspir'd by Heav'n?
Tell me what certain proof is given.
Dost thou intuitively view
What reason tells thee must be true?
No revelation here requir'd;
How proves such truth that thou'rt inspir'd?
For why inspir'd, if but to tell
What reason might have told as well.
As truth beholds thy mental eye
What seems to all the world a lie;
Thy proof imagination strong?
Here also mayst thou still be wrong.
From Heav'n if ever fir'd conceit,
Brandy has also done the feat.
Nay oft th' infatuate of brain,
Of Heav'n's presum'd injunctions vain,
Have madly broke its dread commands.
And dipt in blood their murd'ring hands.
If God or devil then inspire,
Of reason still we must inquire:
And reason doubtless would reply,
"Heav'n never yet reveal'd a lie."
On others gifts confiding more,
Dost give thine own pretensions o'er?
Dost from th' inspir'd thy faith receive,
And pin it on thy neighbour's sleeve?
Reason or Heav'n must tell thee too,
If such be more inspir'd than you.
"Where then the proof?" I frankly own,
To me, yet uninspir'd, unknown:
Such guides, to me, by madness fir'd,
As madmen,
More properly perhaps
idiots.
The sentiment as it thus stands is Dr.
Whichcote
's.
with the Turks, inspir'd.
In spite of
Middleton
and
Hume,
Dost thou on miracles presume?
To revelation these thy guide;
Thy faith by wonders verified.
Go thou, and, easy of belief,
My comrade ask if I'm a thief.
If inspiration false and true,
Sure miracles suspicious too:
And, hence, thy conduct most absurd,
To take for one the other's word.
Our souls how long to damn and save,
Hath subtile priestcraft play'd the knave!
Its pupils train'd, from early youth,
T'equivocate and hide the truth;
To practise the deception nice,
Of tricking hand, or quaint device;
To cheat the palate, nose and eye;
And gild that dirty pill, a lie.
Yet dost thou miracles maintain?
Be here thy definition plain:
The muse disdaining to reply
To such as shock the naked eye.
i. e.
palpable impostures.
Events as miracles dost own,
Whose cause immediate is unknown;
Or is thy faith establish'd more
On actions ne'er perform'd before?
Alas, my much believing friend,
The times of yore might these defend;
When heretick free-thinkers rose,
That dar'd the holy church oppose;
For infidelity renown'd,
Asserting that the globe was round;
Vile heresy! whence, doom'd to hell,
Upsal
's good bishop martyr fell:
Wretches, so impious as to hold,
The earth about its axis roll'd,
And, as the years their courses run,
Still took its journeys round the sun;
Vile heresy! for which, 'tis said,
Old
Galileo
too had bled,
Had not the sage, more loth to die,
Recanting, damn'd it for a lie.
According to the terms of Abjuration.
Ego,
Galileo,
corde sincero et fide non ficta, abjuro,
maledico
et detestor supradictos errores et baereses.
In days of ignorance like these,
When legends had the pow'r to please;
While love of wonder salv'd deceit,
And gudgeons swallow'd whole the cheat;
How little strange that monks and fryars
Should prove miraculously liars;
Or converts to divines so sad
Turn out miraculously mad!
But now, a century worn away,
Time working wonders ev'ry day,
The vast discov'ries years have made
Have spoilt the wonder-monger's trade.
Sayst thou, events so strange of yore
Since now miraculous no more,
True miracles thou wouldst define
As real acts of power divine,
Th' effects of some immediate cause,
In fact transgressing nature's laws.
This is Mr.
Hume
's definition of a miracle, to which, however, we do not subscribe; as it appears to us to supersede the very possibility of miracles: the reality of which cannot be philosophically denied: As, from several late discoveries it appears, that the knowledge of mankind, in physical causes and effects, is not sufficiently extensive to establish a negative against any pretended phenomenon whatever. It should be consider'd, also, that the truth of miracles does not depend on the reality of the facts represented, but on the veracity of that representation. Neither doth the certainty of the fact appear at all needful to the end for which miracles were confessedly intended; for the apparent effect of a supernatural power would have the same influence on the spectator as a real one: as it is by appearance only we judge of reality.
How!—did th' omnipotent, on high,
Let those, his laws, at random fly:
Or was his providence so blind
To what omnisciency design'd,
That still his sov'reign will attends
To strike his foes or skreen his friends;
That pow'r beyond th' Almighty's art
To nature's system to impart:
Needful Heav'n's arbitrary fire
To blast a fig-tree or a liar?
Lorenzo,
be not thou so vain,
To think thus brittle nature's chain;
From which whatever link we strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, broke alike,
See
Pope
's essay on man. Epis. I. Ver. 246.
Connecting systems all destroy'd,
Unballanc'd worlds would strow the void,
To atoms burst; restor'd again
Old
Chaos
to his ancient reign:
Unless, in time, the
God
attend
The works of his own hand to mend.
Alas, how blasphemous to say
That Heav'n can save no other way;
Or that, for trifles or in joke,
Creation's sacred order's broke.
The accounts, given us of the miracles of our Saviour and his Apostles, cannot, however, be denied, whether we suppose the facts really, or only apparently, to have happen'd: as in either case, the perceptible effects might flow from natural causes, unknown to philosophy; yet adapted in the general system of things to answer the ends of providence.
For do we not, in fact, confess,
If God may nature's laws transgress,
The wise creator wanted skill
His vast intentions to fulfil,
Or that th' intention, tho' his own,
Was in th' extent to him unknown:
Or, still more impiously, imply
That Heav'n can give itself the lie.
Say, then, that miracles there be;
They're but miraculous to thee:
So many links conceal'd remain,
Which form the complicated chain,
True causes and effects between,
In Nature's providential scene.
What tho' without an obvious cause
We see inverted custom's laws,
Must we immediately infer
That nature from itself can err?
Commanded by the
word
divine,
Say water chang'd itself to wine;
Graves open'd wide their pond'rous jaws;
A breath the sole apparent cause.
Ah, who shall boast, that
God
revere,
Creation's laws were broken here?
It cannot be denied, indeed, but God may act
praeter
tho' not
contra scientiam naturae;
the supposition, however, is not at all necessary to justifie our belief in miracles.
Might not ten thousand springs unite,
Causes too fine for mortal sight,
Such varied wonders to produce;
To providential ends of use:
Form'd when by Heav'n, its pow'r display'd,
The earth's foundation first was laid:
Or when that
Logos
The
word. St. John
chap. I.
was design'd
By miracles to save mankind.
Think not,
Lorenzo,
nature strays
Whene'er the world is in amaze.
Extend thy view from pole to pole:
See one great miracle the whole;
Where all events their cause succeed,
As once the great,
first cause
decreed;
Where order still from order flows,
And never interruption knows;
Capricious but to mortal sense
The harmony of providence.
How strangely, therefore, bigots err
Who wonders to plain facts prefer;
With list'ning ear, who love to range,
And greedy eye, for all that's strange;
Rejecting their creator's plan,
The voice of God for that of man.
Besides, thy miracles confin'd
To former ages of mankind,
Nature in these our latter days
Unmov'd by pray'r, and deaf to praise,
Ne'er turning back, nor led aside,
To help our wants, or sooth our pride;
But keeping, pack-horse like, its track,
Bearing the world upon its back:
Say such to revelation guide;
For these on hear-say we confide:
In want of proof, on trust must take
For honest jew or gentile's sake;
Since, howsoe'er the truth conceal'd,
None trust in miracles reveal'd;
Unless learn'd
Jortin
's
Or rather that of
Maimonides,
a Jew, of whom Dr.
Jortin
says, he borrowed it. The interpretation, however, is ingenious, and the Dr. has made the best on't. He supposes
Balaam
was in a trance or vision.
scheme may pass
Of dreaming
Balaam
's talking ass.
Dost thou, secure, historians trust?
How know we if their tale be just.
From num'rous causes prone to err,
Dubious, alas, what these aver.
What from deception e'er can save
The man whose trust is in a knave;
To falsehood he how oft a tool
Whose confidence is in a fool:
And should, themselves, the honest speak;
The honest may be blind or weak;
Be led a visionary dance,
Like
Peter,
in prophetick trance,
See
Acts
Chap. 11. and 12.
Or good
St. Paul,
that seldom knew
If what he said was false or true;
Forgetful, if his word we take,
When fast asleep or wide awake.
Cor.
2 Ep. Chap. 12. et passim.
My friend, no wonder, then, at all,
Adventures strange should such befall;
Or that, by wild opinions, they
From truth are blindly led astray;
Who, like old wives in winter nights,
Hear, see, and feel, and chat with sprights.
Their prudent caution, therefore, just
Who waking dreamers seldom trust;
To whom light visions fact may seem,
And fact itself an idle dream.
In reverence, yet, we all must own
The pow'r and will of God unknown;
Confin'd not to the narrow bound
Of reason's most extensive round;
Active a thousand ways beside;
Providence, says
South,
acts by methods
beside
and beyond the discoveries of man's reason.
Beyond unknown how far and wide.
From grey experience, hence, conceal'd
The gifts of grace to babes reveal'd;
From Science hid that sacred fire
Heav'n's chosen servants doth inspire;
Who, highly favour'd from above,
Behold descend th' all-quickening dove,
Or cloven tongue; the spiritual boast
Of brethren in the Holy Ghost.
Lorenzo,
then let you, nor I,
Unless we can disprove, deny.
And yet, in search of truths unknown,
Experience be thy guide alone;
Nay held perception in suspense
Till reason may confirm the sense:
To Science only unconfin'd
When God, himself, informs the mind.
EPISTLE THE
THIRD.
ARGUMENT.
On the infatuation of mankind, respecting paradox and mysteries. —The effects and causes of such infatuation. —The absurdity of supposing ignorance and folly the means to promote the cause of truth; or that the freedom of scientifick enquiry is incompatible with the political welfare of society.
SUMMARY.
IT is remarkable that, notwithstanding the universality of those truths which are founded on
common-sense,
mankind have ever been so infatuated as to reject this general and obvious criterion, for the more particular dogmas and mysterious paradoxes of pretended revelation. —The moral effects of this infatuation exemplified in our superficial attachment to religion, our indolent security in time of prosperity, and our transitory astonishment and penitence under the immediate weight of misfortune. —An absurd scheme of education the grand cause of that cowardice and imbecility of mind, which render us so ridiculous in speculation and inconsistent in practice. —The misapplication of their talents, therefore, who think by encreasing such weakness to promote the cause of truth, or the interest of religion and morality, is plac'd in a ridiculous light; as the just object of censure. —The supposition, also, that ignorance and implicit subjection to authority are necessary to the well-being of society, or the political happiness of mankind, is exploded; and shown to be exemplarily false and absurd: polity in general, as well as religion and private virtue in particulars, being founded on truth and nature, and not dependant on the chimerical productions of fancy, the low artifices of faction, or the knavish cunning of designing falsehood.
EPISTLE THE
THIRD.
IF truth in science we may find;
Its root implanted in the mind;
To this so just the world's pretence;
On the plain rules of
common-sense;
Our mental faculties t'abuse,
How prostituted is the muse!
How long have childish bards too long,
Their hours employ'd in idle song;
Busied the lineaments to trace
Of wither'd fiction's painted face;
Where not a native beauty blows;
But cankers eat the budding rose!
Yet, captive to her smiles and wit,
Pleas'd with their chains, her slaves have writ;
And all the labour'd pomp of verse
Employ'd, her fables to rehearse;
While thou, O sacred truth! remain
The theme of ev'ry humbler strain.
And yet, if true what each pretends,
How num'rous are her rhyming friends!
While such her fond admirers prove,
And tune their rival songs to love.
But, fools in fondness as in awe,
The truth, 'tis plain, they never saw;
And but themselves her lovers boast,
Because her name the publick toast.
So smit with sacred truth and rhyme,
The bard and sophist of the time;
Monsieur
de Voltaire,
remarkable for his regard to
truth;
and the profundity of his philosophical speculations.
Long play'd, by turns, the wit and fool,
The monarch's and the printer's tool;
The jest the genius of the age,
Till hiss'd and pelted off the stage:
Whence now no more his lyre he strings
For tyrant booksellers and kings;
But, fir'd with vanity and spleen,
Dotes on the truth unsought, unseen;
Chaunting, so happy to be
free,
Enraptur'd rhymes on liberty.
Such lovers truth must e'er despise;
Who see her but with borrow'd eyes,
Who only play the lover's part,
No real passion at the heart.
For say, what lover's passion true
For beauty that he never knew?
So eastern monarchs love their wives,
Tho' barren strangers all their lives.
So lov'd
la Mancha
's famous knight
The fair, for whom he swore to fight;
Fir'd by th' enthusiastick rage,
With men and monsters to engage.
Yet, ask'd, for whom this martial strife;
"He never saw her in het life:
"Nor was he positive, God wot,
"Whether, indeed, she liv'd or not."
Thus bards too oft in truth's defence,
Break through the rules of common-sense;
And; o'er his rival each t'aspire;
Strive which shall prove the greatest liar.
Strange to the liberty of thought,
Vile slaves! but seeking to be bought;
To lying faction early train'd;
A purchase by the truth disdain'd.
Mean-time, as insolent as vain;
They freedom's sacred name profane;
And, boasting, hug the chains that bind
That worst of slaves, the servile mind.
Such,
Dryden,
thou, supreme in wit,
Immortal and unrival'd yet:
How honour'd; might not truth accuse
Thy venal, prostiuted muse.
Sayst thou 'tis strange the world should rest
Content, by falsehood thus depress'd?
Alas, thou little knowst mankind,
That, seeing, imitate the blind;
In spite of truth and open day,
In darkness chuse to grope their way;
Suspecting plainness of disguise,
The obvious sense of terms despise;
From sound or derivation gleaning,
Some hard-word, deuteroscope meaning:
While each impostor's word prevails
In mystick parables and tales;
Neglected ev'n the voice of Heaven,
When rational instructions given.
Look back through each successive age:
How honour'd the mysterious page!
What millions have been made the tools
Of knaves, whose nat'ral prey are fools!
How strangely trick'd deluded crowds
Who, truth expecting from the clouds,
And therefore gaping up in th'air,
On errour stumbled unaware!
Thus an astrologer of old,
In learned history we're told;
Contemplating the milky way,
Neglected that before him lay;
And led by wand'ring planets, fell,
Unluckily into a well.
Yet e'er with slander branding those
Who sought the naked truth t' expose:
Short sighted mortals, in their pride,
Thus strove their ignorance to hide;
By holding all beyond their view
Beyond investigation too.
Lorenzo,
our misfortune here
Th' effect of idleness and fear.
The sluggard shuns inquiry's task,
Because too great the pains to ask;
Stifling th' emotions of his breast,
T' indulge his lazy brains in rest.
A paradox, yet such the fact,
"More fear to think than fear to act;
"In thought tho' danger we surmize,
"In act while real danger lies."
Mr.
Hume.
In truth, my friend, 'tis sad to find
Hence rise the zeal of half mankind;
Religion but the compound vice
Of indolence and cowardice.
Ev'n pious christians, much I fear,
Oft practically atheists here.
How deaf and blind to calls of grace
When nature wears a smiling face:
But when she frowns; in wild amaze,
Look how th' affrighted cowards gaze.
When clouds drop fatness on the plains,
In mildly soft descending rains;
In their due season harvests smile,
And plenty crowns the peasant's toil:
As nothing rare, as nothing new,
We take the blessing as our due.
For O! prosperity's a lot
At ease enjoy'd, with ease forgot.
In June's warm sun and April's shower
We trace not an Almighty power:
Ingrates! so light of Heav'n we make,
Nor think the hand that gives may take.
But ah! when threat'ning storms arise;
When thunders rattle through the skies;
When the tall mountain bows its head,
And earthquakes vomit up the dead;
Behold whole nations prostrate fall
Before the mighty God of all.
T' appease his anger now their care,
Lo, all is fasting, sighs and pray'r;
Till, the dread storm blown haply o'er,
They rise and revel as before,
Forget, or ridicule, the rod;
And laugh to scorn the fear of God.
Nor only, mov'd when danger's nigh,
Our fears awake the gen'ral cry;
Imaginary scenes, alike,
The dastard soul with terrour strike;
While to the coward's opticks seem
Light straws, as each a giant's beam.
In honour thus of God above,
So weakly draw the cords of love;
While nature's groans, or fancy's fears,
Drive, headlong, down the vale of tears.
Lorenzo,
wouldst thou freely trace
Whence grows a cowardice so base?
At th' early dawn of moral sense
Th' infatuation did commence;
And, propagated since by art,
We all have more or less a part.
Ere hermit bald or pilgrim grey
Had worn the solitary way;
Ere yet the monk had told his beads;
Ere yet credulity or creeds;
To school, with sober
Reason
sent,
Young
Genius
to
Experience
went.
The latter, tho', as yet, 'tis true,
No wiser than the former two,
In charge the tender pupils took,
And with them read in nature's book.
So pedagogues unletter'd use
No class of blockheads to refuse;
But gravely undertake t' explain
The arts themselves must first attain;
Sufficient if the master goes
Before his blund'ring pupil's nose.
Careful his vacant hours t'employ,
Now
Reason
prov'd a hopeful boy.
But
Genius,
insolent and wild,
By nature an assuming child,
A treach'rous memory his lot,
The little that he learn'd forgot;
Nor gave himself a moment's pain
To con his lessons o'er again:
But, trusting to his forward parts,
Debauch'd with wit the sister-
arts;
Who, yet unsettled, young and frail,
Enamour'd, listen'd to his tale;
And, since the cause of dire disputes,
Turn'd out abandon'd prostitutes:
By priest and prophet, once enjoy'd,
To basest purposes employ'd;
For ages past, their only use
To vitiate reason or traduce.
For this,
Tradition
foremost came,
Instruction was her maiden name,
Now grown a smooth-tongu'd slipp'ry jade,
An arrant mistress of her trade.
She told the stories, o'er and o'er,
That genius told the arts before,
Repeating lies, as liars do,
Till in the end they think them true;
And when detected in her lie,
"Myst'ry"—the
biter
's arch reply.
By this fine dame our mothers taught,
Their scheme of education wrought;
So train'd us early to deceit,
To look on reason as a cheat;
To lies first tun'd the op'ning ear;
Awoke our earliest sense to fear;
With monsters and chimeras vain,
Fill'd the soft head and turn'd the brain;
Till the fond fools, to top their part,
Fix'd the rank coward at the heart.
Nor with our growing years releas'd;
The nurse but moulds us for the priest;
Who, lest his ward, grown sly or stout,
Should find the knavish secret out,
The bugbear from his reach removes,
And all th' old woman's tale improves,
Passions more riotous to quell,
Chang'd the dark hole for darker hell;
The truant damn'd for naughty play,
Black monday
now the judgment day;
Gay hopes for promis'd toys are given,
And endless
holidays
in Heav'n.
The groundless fear and vain desire,
Which hence mankind in youth acquire;
How deeply rooted do we find,
How fix'd th' impressions on the mind;
The weakness of those childish fears,
Too oft increasing with our years;
While ev'ry infant joy and strife,
Improv'd, is carried into life.
For see the idiot and the wise,
Each from his own fond shadow flies;
Like curs that run till nature fails,
A bladder fasten'd to their tails.
With idle fears the world t' abuse,
Assistant here th' inventive
muse:
The tale of wonder early taught;
When playful, young and void of thought,
By stroling
Fancy
led astray,
The vagrant, troul'd the jovial lay.
Alas of mirth and pleasure cur'd,
To horrour's brownest shade inur'd;
By love of wonder since betray'd,
To lend fantastick
Spleen
her aid:
For whom her numbers, sad and slow,
In dismal melancholy flow;
Condemn'd to murmur all the day,
To sigh and groan the midnight lay;
The skull, the spade, the shroud, the herse,
The doleful implements of verse;
Or doom'd prepost'rous tales to tell,
By brain-sick
Fiction
brought from hell.
For know th' unwary muse was caught
While
Fiction
yet her friend was thought;
A hag, by
Ignorance
badly nurs'd,
With craving appetite accurs'd,
To
Spleen
's embrace, while yet a maid,
The dire chlorosis had betray'd.
Since when, the wretch has roam'd abroad,
Her sullen tyrant's willing bawd;
A vile procuress, to supply
The love of wonder with a lie.
Hence bards, that reason less than rail,
Affect to tell the woful tale;
Or vent their moralizing rage;
As bugbears of a fearful age;
To truth pretending to be led
by megrims in the sick-man's head;
As if with zeal prophetick burn'd
The wretch whose blister'd head was turn'd;
The fittest those the truth to teach,
By fevers half-depriv'd of speech;
Whose fault'ring tongues most loud complain,
When death or doctors shake the brain.
Nor seldom, by transition led
From dying moralists to dead,
Tristful, in hypocondres vex'd,
The musing parson chews his text;
Some solemn scene of dullness sought,
To aid his rectitude of thought;
The murky vaults, the haunted cells,
Where moping
melancholy
dwells,
And
fear,
that kneels in piteous plight,
Her straggling hair all bolt upright.
Fit comrades these as e'er could chuse
The splenetick or maudlin muse;
Her doleful ditties proud to sing
Where sadness spreads her dusky wing;
Where croaks the syren of the lake
The light-of-heart from ease to wake;
And solemn owls, in concert grave,
Join hoot the worldly-wise to save.
'Twas thus enthusiastick
Young;
'Twas thus affected
Hervey
sung;
As I have profess'd to proceed on the
Horatian
principle,
Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,
it may be observ'd, that in this work, no scruple is made of treating some respectab1e names with that freedom which becomes an advocate for the truth: the mention of which is conceiv'd a sufficient apology, if any be necessary, for such occasional strictures, as the subject led me to make on cotemporary writers.
Whose motley muse, in florid strain,
With owls did to the moon complain;
Clear'd at the morn her raven throat,
To sound the glibber magpye's note.
Mean-while religion gravely smil'd
To see grown
piety
a child;
In leading-strings to find her led,
By those her fost'ring hand had bred.
For why confin'd the moral muse,
To blasted oaks or baleful yews:
O'er graves to make fantastick moan,
And deepen horrour's dismal groan?
Say, hath alone the mould'ring tomb
For pious meditation room?
Ah! wont with meek-eyed peace to rove,
Through church-way path or silent grove;
Her grateful influence round her shed,
Where groan the sick, or sleep the dead;
With truth and soberness serene,
Enliv'ning ev'ry solemn scene;
Disarming
terrour
of it's pow'r,
To wander at the midnight hour;
Sweet
philomel,
harmonious spright,
The only spectre of the night.
Can love of truth impose the task,
To lurk beneath a gorgon mask;
To stalk, in garb terrifick clad,
And scoul the weak and wicked mad;
Or drive the wretch, o'erwhelm'd with care,
In godly frenzy, to despair?
Is folly vice, fear makes it worse;
Reflection is the coward's curse:
Unless remorse in mercy given,
To damn self-murderers to heaven.
Why, then, is sought the midnight shade
From vice or falsehood to dissuade?
Is night less vicious than the day?
Doth errour guide the solar ray?
Or is exhal'd, like morning dew,
The moral object or the true?
O, most ridiculous the scene,
Where
super stition
feeds the
spleen;
Where the gray spectre stalks to view,
As burns th' expirin taper blue;
Or dances o'er the dizzy sight
The form of many a dreadful spright:
Mean-while a victim to his fears
The moon-struck moralist appears.
For when the brain wild fancy fires;
Reason most prudently retires.
As sober men from drunkards part,
For such companions griev'd at heart.
Awes, then, with tremulous restraint
The painted urn or plaster saint?
Humbles the mutilated bust
The rotten sinner to the dust?
Lorenzo,
here, no errour make,
Nor cowardice for conscience take
Alas, repentance, void of root,
May blossom fair yet fail of fruit:
Attrition vain and insincere
Mere weakness all, unmanly fear.
In the dark grove what horrour reigns
To chill the blood in
Chiron
's
A modern Centaur—See the preface to a book entitled the
Centaur not fabulous.
veins,
When th'
ignis fatuus
glares, by night,
Terrifick witchcraft to his sight;
Or, animated by his fears,
Alive the fresh-lopp'd elm appears;
A giant ghost the nestling thrush,
That shakes the formidable bush;
Securely perching on whose breast,
The anxious black-bird builds its nest;
Or, on its arm-extending spray,
The nightingale repeats her lay:
Th' heroick titmouse or the wren
Less fearful than the sons of men;
Who yet to conscience give the lie,
And dare the pow'r of truth defy.
For know, no tremour can impart
Conviction to the skeptick's heart:
Nor takes, like agues, in a fright,
Trembling impiety its flight.
Behold the tyrant's iron hand,
That holds in chains a captive land;
In whose firm grasp imprison'd lies
Bold freedom, struggling as it dies;
Crush'd by whose weight, the monarch bleeds
And sceptres break like blighted reeds:
See this strong hand let fall the rod,
And tremble if the bulrush nod;
Belshazzar
's like, enervate fall,
If laid a finger on the wall:
The wretch, of God nor man afraid,
Yet trembling at an empty shade.
Nor only fear th'
immoral
crew;
The coward
pious
tremble too:
Philosophy herself a fool,
Attended by her nurse to school.
Such dupes to fear, at times, we find
The best, the wisest of mankind!
For Oh! what antidote so strong
As poison, that has work'd so long!
What drug eradicates the pest,
Suck'd from the mother's tainted breast?
In vain the doctor we may try:
No
doctor
's fee our cure can buy:
Tho', tamp'ring with the dire disease,
Licentiates
mock with present ease;
And
emp'ricks,
salving ev'ry sore,
With nostrums make, it rage the more.
Sayst thou, "in, policy, afraid
"To spoil the priest's and lawyer's trade,
"The
statesman,
topping the
divine,
"Supports with pow'r the same design;
"To keep th' inquisitive in awe,
"Smacking his long-tail'd whip, the law;
"Or thund'ring in the vulgar ear
"Implicit faith and groundless fear:
"The nostrums these of church and state;
"To make a nation good and great."
Thus forfeit
patriots
that pretence
They make, as
men,
to common-sense?
Can ignorance be understood
As needful to the publick good;
That free inquiry such decry;
And boast their salutary lie?
Or, are they here by habit led,
And innovation's tumult dread?
So sacred held the stated rules
Of custom, lawgiver to fools!
Yet custom's rules caprice hath broke,
And turn'd her statutes into joke;
Nor boast her laws, however old,
Resistance to the pow'r of gold.
Shall science, then, still drag her chain,
And sigh for liberty in vain?
Forbid it Heav'n! that thus the mind,
By tyrant policy confin'd,
Should bow while falsehood bears the sway,
And give the cause of truth away.
Is this,
Lorenzo,
to be free?
Are these the sweets of liberty?
That glorious priv'lege yours and mine,
In our own sties, like sensual swine,
At will, to grumble, eat and drink;
But ah, prohibited to think!
Our, nobler appetites denied
Their proper feasts, and damn'd for pride;
Forbad our reason to employ;
Depriv'd of each sublimer joy;
Robb'd of the privilege to
know,
Man's chief prerogative below!
May
Britons
boast, of all mankind,
The nobler fortitude of mind;
To set blind prejudice apart;
To rend th' old woman from the heart;
To laugh at blind tradition's rules,
The mother and the nurse of fools?
Have they with blood so dearly bought
Their boasted privilege of thought;
To throw like school-boys, tir'd with play,
The long disputed prize away?
Ah! had not custom often fail'd,
What barbarism had still prevail'd?
Deaf to the call of truth and grace,
Denying reformation place,
What lengths still stubborn faith had run,
To end what madd'ning zeal begun?
In honour still of
Moloch's
name,
Our children might have pass'd the flame;
By persecution's faggot rais'd;
Religious fires in
Smithfield
blaz'd;
Or now, as in a
Stuart's
reign,
Been dy'd with blood
Iërne's
plain.
Nay still how prepossess'd we find
With pious falsehoods half mankind.
Think from the stake how late repriev'd
Wretches, no charity, reliev'd:
Oh horrour! to the slaughter led,
For wearing rags and wanting bread;
Doom'd by inhuman, legal rage,
Martyrs to poverty and age.
The unhappy victims to an act of parliament, not long since repeal'd, by virtue of which many hundreds of poor wretches were formerly hang'd, or burnt, for witchcraft.
See still th' enthusiastick band
Cant, whine and madden o'er the land;
By scripture-craz'd fanaticks led,
Westley,
or partners at their head.
See ev'n the learning of our schools
Perverted to bewilder fools;
The words of plainness to disguise,
And baffle reason with surprize;
While truth and nature plead in vain
Against the comment of
Romaine.
A famous Hutchinsonian divine, of the church of
England.
Ah! think how fatal, soon or late,
Such crazy members to the state:
How dang'rous to the publick weal
Blind ignorance and foolish zeal.
Reflect in what a dreadful hour
Nonsense usurp'd the hand of power;
When puritans the land o'er-run,
And sacrilege was pious fun:
While wretches, for their country's good,
Dipt their vile hands in
royal
blood.
Is ignorance the curse of God?
Shakespear.
Avert good Heav'n th' impending rod!
O leave, ye patriots, leave the mind
In search of knowledge unconfin'd:
Lest truth your cunning should despise,
Returning to its native skies.
If men were not to declare their opinions in spite of establishments, either in church or state, truth would be soon banish'd the earth.
Ded. to Essay on Spirit.
Good policy to truth's allied;
By science guided not the guide.
Cease too, ye bards, so wond'rous wise,
T'instruct by means you should despise.
In sober sadness, much too long
Mankind have listen'd to your song;
Have strain'd the mental eye, to see
Your false, fantastick imag'ry;
With gaudy colours glaring bright,
To captivate the vulgar sight;
The gaping idiot's grin of praise,
Or stare of ignorance to raise.
Nay, tho' approv'd your moral ends,
Ye still are truth's mistaken friends,
Ah! full as dang'rous to her cause
As even those who spurn her laws.
No visionary fears intrude
Where triumphs moral rectitude.
Truth
all the artifice disdains
Of dungeons deep, and clanking chains;
Skulks not in life's sequester'd way;
But walks abroad in open day.
'Tis
Falsehood,
her grim face to hide,
Shuffles on nature's darkest side;
Baffling, in terrour's murky den,
The scrutiny of honest men.
EPISTLE THE
FOURTH.
ARGUMENT.
On the weakness of the human understanding. —The abstract existence of the Deity. —The incomprehensibility of the divine nature, and the incongruity of pretended atheism.
SUMMARY.
AS it is necessary to our success in scientifick researches that the mind should be divested of its prejudices, in favour of tradition and custom; so, however extensive be the freedom of enquiry, it is equally necessary that the object of investigation be adapted to the limits of the understanding: mankind always falling into errour and confusion, in their attempts to discover the knowledge of things beyond their capacity. However true, therefore, may be many of our discoveries in the system of Nature;
God,
the authour of that system, is abstracted from it and above our comprehension. — Hence our pretensions to describe, or define, the
Deity,
are palpably absurd and ridiculous. For, tho' a created Being may ascribe to its creator the most respectable of all known perfections, yet, as all its ideas of perfection are relative to itself, the attributes human beings ascribe to God are necessarily the superior qualities of
humanity.
—Notwithstanding, however, the Deity is so far removed from our enquiries, and thereby confessedly no object of philosophical knowledge, yet the actual disbelief of the existence of a God is denied: the arguments for and against atheists composing, in fact, a very ridiculous dispute: as the impossibility of denying the being of a
first cause
is evident; and the rest of the controversy a mere cavil about words, of no determinate meaning.
EPISTLE THE
FOURTH.
RUL'D by no giant hopes or fears,
Whose stature grows with length of years,
In search of truth expect to find
The labour suited to the mind;
With genius, nature bearing part,
The strict, yet gentle, nurse of art.
Then aim not thou a point to hit,
Above the reach of human wit;
As if mankind could judge of aught
Beyond th' ability of thought.
Join not,
Lorenzo,
blindly those.
Who first would nature's God disclose;
Their moral and religious schemes
Building on theologick dreams;
Deduc'd the principles they own
From others equally unknown.
For, say the voice of reason true;
Be ours a just abstracted view:
Be it the privilege of man,
To trace exactly nature's plan;
The scale of beings in his hands,
To know the point at which he stands,
Compar'd with all he boasts to know,
As well above him as below:
Yet, if, of human logick vain,
He link to Heav'n a kindred chain,
Conclusions idle soon he draws;
And Heav'n prescribes by human laws.
Imagine thou in what degree
A seraph stands 'tween God and thee;
The neck how lowly dost thou bend
Before thy bright seraphick friend?
But place thyself a mite unseen
And being infinite between;
In this comparison, says pride,
A seraph thou, to God allied.
Thy pride,
Lorenzo,
disbelieve;
Let
Locke
nor
Addison
deceive;
For tho' creation's varied plan
Assigns degrees respecting man,
Yet, bigot, know, and learn to fear,
God is beyond thy proper sphere.
Created beings, all his care,
Doth he with them creation
share?
Ah no! the system all our own,
God, the creator, stands alone:
At equal distance all his plan,
The mite, the seraph, or the man.
Is it not so, the passive clay
Of yon Corinthian column gay,
That gilt entablature or base,
Or marble of yon shining vase,
Resemble more the artist's mind
Than if to meaner use consign'd.
Absurd! is
Jones
's genius known
By the great model or the stone?
The pile, erect to
Trajan
's name,
Affected not by empty fame,
The cross rever'd, the honour'd bust,
And trodden floor are kindred dust:
For all in one degree respect
Their sov'reign lord, the architect.
How justly then soe'er we plead
That reason
nature's
book doth read,
As by its known establish'd laws
Of each effect we trace the cause,
Those laws can ne'er, themselves, confine
The legislative power divine:
Whose will those very laws decreed
And bad th' effect the cause succeed:
Agent, in some superior scheme,
Of which in this we can but dream.
Bear
Atticus
the critick's rod
In vain we, then, define a God;
In vain we attributes bestow;
Or reason, here, from what we know.
Tho' science teach, religion warm,
What wild ideas still we form?
Imperfect embrios of the brain,
That strive to scale the Heav'ns in vain.
Too short to reach beyond the sky
The focus of the mental eye;
Too cold our most transporting zeal
To paint what heav'ns and light conceal.
Yet will the skeptick ask me why?
Go, rise and to the dog-star fly.
Thou canst not: nor the cause unknown.
Central attraction holds thee down;
A pow'r occult, which, ere thy birth,
Fast bound thee to thy native earth:
From which thou ne'er canst hope to rise
To lunar plains or solar skies.
Nor less, within it's sphere, confin'd
The subtile essence of the mind.
What tho' it boast the pow'r to rove
In freedom through the plains above;
Tho' wing'd it's active feet to run,
With
Merc'ry
round the central sun;
Giv'n it far distant worlds t' explore;
And seas of space without a shore:
Yet, still, within creation's round,
Within our narrow system bound;
Of what's above or what without
We harbour universal doubt.
Say light prevails, no contrast shade
Outlines the void we would prevade:
If darkness reign no chearing ray
Delineates blind inquiry's way.
Hence, mortal man, must ever be
Thy authour, God, unknown to thee;
Destin'd thy erring way to trace
Through nature's parti-colour'd space.
Let ign'rance, then, her idol dress
In justice, love, and happiness;
Adorn with mercy's golden chain,
With all the virtues grace its train;
And then adore in humble plight,
Calling those fopp'ries infinite.
The pagan thus, despis'd as blind,
Creates his idol to his mind;
Thinking his deity express'd
By bird or beast he likes the best;
Then bows before the painted shrine;
And calls his wooden God divine.
Cast the presumptuous thought aside:
'Tis not humility but pride;
Unless that truly humble we,
T' adore the God
humanity.
And such it is: for whence arise
Our virtues but from moral ties;
Whose known relations thus define
That essence mortals call divine.
Lorenzo,
ready for reply,
Lay not thy prompt objection by.
Thou sayst "thy friend himself deceives,
"Nor God adores nor God believes:
"For tho' the mind the pow'r descry,
"If left its essence in the sky,
"If none imagin'd or display'd,
"To nothing adoration paid:
"In me no certain faith is found;
"My deity an empty found."
Not so: for, granting, I confess,
Thy attributes a God express;
Thou sayst thyself "still undefin'd
"The perfect, by th' imperfect, mind."
And to thy attributes must join
Thy
infinite
or thy
divine.
As jugglers, who, t' enhance deceit,
To sacred science give their cheat,
While, with the curtain, still they hide
The slight of hand too closely eyed:
So sly theologues here impart
The
hocus pocus
of their art;
Holding religion's sacred veil,
Where slights of understanding fail.
For know, alas, their wisest plan
Displays but a superiour man,
Whom infinite the conjurer's rod,
Presto, converts into a God.
Till, then, they solve our problem right,
And tell us what is infinite,
They still must be reduc'd to own
Their compound deity unknown:
To all, or reasoning or inspir'd,
This infinite a term requir'd.
Differs
Lorenzo,
then, with me?
In terms alone we disagree:
Perfection infinite is thine,
Indefinite perfection mine.
Condemn not, then, half understood.
I not deny that perfect, good,
All-gracious, merciful, and wife,
God reigns, supreme, beyond the skies,
For, to deny that the moral perfections, ascrib'd to God, are, in no degree or affinity whatever, his proper attributes, would be as unphilosophical as to assert, on the other hand, that our ideas of goodness, justice, mercy, &c. are strictly applicable to the deity.
Neither, 'tis true, my terms imply;
But, granting none, I none deny:
Requiring but to acquiesce
That thou thy
infinite
express.
Idly doth
Bolingbroke
refine;
Granting that wisdom is divine,
While, as absurdly, he denies
Justice and goodness to the skies.
Ideas, equally our own,
Our goodness as our wisdom's known;
To both as hard to reconcile
Or nature's frown or nature's smile.
Alas! no attributes of thine
Can e'er the deity define;
Impossible to judge, or know,
Of God above from man below:
At least so far as to judge of his providential designs or ultimate determinations, from our suppos'd knowledge of his attributes: for how shall we know what may be consistent or inconsistent with God's justice and goodness, when even moral goodness and justice between man and man, are points in dispute.
Reserv'd the prospect of the skies
To gratify immortal eyes.
Lorenzo,
let us reason right.
No finite spans an infinite;
Unless, with
Matho,
vers'd in arts,
We hold th' infinity of
parts.
But none th' absurdity will plan,
That God can be contain'd in man;
Tho', as absurdly, they suppose
Our partial gifts the God disclose.
Joinst thou, with
Florio,
the dispute,
T' enhance each moral attribute?
Pretending "these, however crude,
"Divine perfection doth include:
"As species in a genus they,
"Or parts, which, join'd, the whole display."
So, with the grandeur all t'inspire
Of the gay mansion of his fire,
An idiot heir, his mother's fool,
Taught his synecdoché at school,
Conceiv'd by part the whole was shown;
And took a sample of the
stone.
Convinc'd, doth
Polydore,
with me,
That God's indefinite agree,
Yet argue "that our partial view
"May still be relatively true:
"For, if no abstract lights we gain,
"'Tis just our best to entertain;
"Our God to call that wond'rous cause,
"In nature trac'd, by nature's laws."
Mistake not here nor God dethrone:
The first mechanick cause be known;
'Tis of some prior cause th' effect;
Which no known similars respect.
The God we, then, by this define
Nor self-existent nor divine.
Be known creation's various ties,
Whence physical relations rise;
Of each effect the various cause;
Attraction and repulsion's laws;
That
primum mobilé
be found
That drove
Des Cartes'
whirlpools round;
Let matter, motion, ether, join,
To form thy attributes divine;
Striving if possible to rise
To the first agent in the skies:
Be next explain'd to mortal sense,
The wond'rous scheme of providence;
Down from those great important springs,
On which rebounds the fate of kings,
To those, so exquisitely small,
Destin'd to let the sparrow fall:
Sayst thou the knowledge hence deriv'd
Of him those systems hath contriv'd?
Alas! from hence we only trace
The features of creation's face;
The front it bears to human kind;
But not its self-existing mind.
Should we, presuming to display
The spirit of the golden day,
Thus, call its essence its result,
Attraction, fire, alike occult;
Or say 'tis vegetation green;
Who'd think it is the
sun
we mean?
So here t' absurdity we fall
Nor thus define a God at all.
Yet while, to thee I freely own,
I reverence a God unknown;
Think not, through ignorance or pride,
A God was ever yet denied.
No atheist
By an
atheist
is meant simply one that denies the existence of a God—Divines indeed give that name to skepticks and deists indifferenty.
Dr. South,
if I remember right, seems to have thought it more easy to be a
speculative
than a
practical
atheist: though, in the strict sense of the word, whatever we conclude concerning the latter, the former appears to me impossible.
e'er was known on earth
Till fiery zealots gave him birth,
For controversy's sake, their trade,
And damn'd the heretick they made.
Doth
Clody,
impudent and vain,
Deny a God, in skeptick strain,
And yet in ignorance advance
That nature is the work of chance?
Theologists, absurdly wise,
With their anathemas despise;
For well may
Clody
these inflame,
Whose God exists but in a name;
A technick term, devis'd at school,
I pity
Clody
as a
fool.
To
Epicurus
' strains belong
The censures of an idle song.
For say "united worlds might join
"By accident, and not design;
"Atoms
might luckily
contrive,
"And strangely find themselves alive;
"Or, by some other scheme as wild,
"The world be fortune's fav'rite child."
Explain the terms—say what is meant
By atoms, fortune, accident.
What meanst thou but th' efficient cause
Of nature's works and nature's laws?
O, think not, then, th' eternal mind
To term or epithet confin'd;
But take away or change the name;
And
Clody
's God and mine's the same.
Sayst thou "in
chance
a pow'r defin'd,
"Fortuitous, absurd, and blind,
"Unworthy that stupendous plan,
"Which nature's scenes display to man;
"Where grace, with harmony allied,
"And wisdom strike, on ev'ry side."
Alas! to
Clody
these unknown:
For wond'rous wisdom's all his own.
In nature nothing he surveys;
That actuates his soul to praise:
In vain the planets ran their course,
Obedient to impulsive force;
Th' excentrick comets, far and wide,
Pursue the same unerring guide;
In vain describes their varied race,
In equal times, an equal space:
In vain through microscopick eyes,
Innumerable wonders rise;
On the green leaf whole nations crawl,
And myriads perish in its fall.
Ah me! what bears the barren mind!
What beauty can affect the blind!
Should
Clody
then his
chance
disclaim,
And own a deity, by name,
The blund'ring deist would advance
A God, no wiser than his chance.
Boasts nature, therefore, no
design?
Say whence,
Lorenzo,
yours and mine.
Did wisdom's sons themselves create?
Their birth 'tis own'd they owe to
fate;
To
fate
capricious blind and dull;
Design
lock'd up in th' atheist's skull.
But say, my friend, how came it there?
Lit
chance
upon
occasion
fair,
From odds and ends of
matter
join'd,
To form an
intellectual
mind?
Egregious blunder! gross surmize!
"Nature's a fool yet man is wise."
Is there a mortal, sound of brain,
Who such a tenet can maintain?
O, no—for words let fools contest,
Atheism
's a mere, tho' impious,
jest.
How obvious is the truth! and yet,
What learned volumes have been writ;
How scholiasts labour to refute,
Where none do actually dispute!
Of the first-cause, or fools or wise,
The pure existence none denies;
But in it's essence
Essential attributes.
disagree:
For who defines infinity!
Blush not,
Lorenzo,
then, to own,
Th' eternal God a God unknown;
Whose face, to mortal eye denied,
Can never gratify thy pride.
To him your votive altars raise,
As
Athens
did in ancient days;
Nor dare pollute his sacred shrine
With human sacrifice divine;
But humble adoration bring,
And silent praise; fit offering!
So the
Peruvian,
pure in heart,
Strange to the guile, or guilt of
art,
Unaw'd by tenet, text, or tale,
Erects his temple in the vale,
Sacred to th' universal mind,
The God and guide of human kind.
No firstlings here affront the skies,
Nor clouds of smoking incense rise:
No hypocrite with acid face;
No convert tortur'd into grace;
No solid skull, in wisdom's cowl;
No hooded hawk, nor solemn owl,
Nor blind, nor ominous invade
This spotless consecrated shade:
But, as the native of the spray,
Man hails his maker, with the day;
By nature taught, Heav'n asks no more,
In
spirit
and in
truth
t'adore.
EPISTLE THE
FIFTH.
ARGUMENT.
On happiness. —The apparent incapacity of mankind for its enjoyment. —The comparative pain and pleasure of human sensations; and their relation to our physical and moral constitution.
SUMMARY.
NEXT to the absurdity of puzzling ourselves in the investigation of matters beyond our capacity, and equally an obstacle to our inquiries after truth, is the folly of our constant pursuit, and in spite of as constant disappointments, our expectations of
happiness
—The term is certainly left vague and ill-defin'd even by those philosophers who, pretending it to be attainable, affect to teach us how happiness may be acquir'd—Its meaning is, nevertheless, obvious; and is determined from the tenour of its acceptation with the generality of mankind. In which sense, it is shown to be hitherto unattain'd; and that, not only from the impossibility of
externals
to confer happiness, but, from the evident incapacity of human beings to be made happy—It is hence, also, declar'd unattainable; and even the most laudable means whereby it is pursued, as those of knowledge, religion, and virtue are experimentally, and logically, shown to be incapable of conferring happiness. —In fact, ev'ry state, age and condition of life having its several distinct anxieties and consolations, it appears that a continued sense of either happiness or misery is incompatible with our nature; as well as with the very essence of pleasure and pain in general: our sensations of both which are merely comparative and reciprocally necessary to that of each other. Whence happiness and misery are evidently relative to, and dependant on, the constitution of the human frame; with which abstract pain and pleasure are totally inconsistent.
EPISTLE THE
FIFTH.
BEyond the science of mankind,
In nature's fane our God enshrin'd;
Content,
Lorenzo,
let us trace
The lines, the shaddow, of his face;
In humble boldness seek to know
Our heav'n on earth; our God below.
To face the sun, to beat the sky
Demand an eagle's wing and eye.
Ah! let not, then, mere birds of night,
Whose wings, whose opticks check their flight,
Encourag'd by the morning ray
To risk the sun-shine of the day,
Their feeble pow'rs too highly rate,
And rush absurdly on their fate;
As in the noon-tide beams they gaze
Struck blind by Heav'ns meridian blaze,
For ever after to their cost
To grope; in endless errour lost.
Adapted, then, inquiry's plan
To truths as relative to man,
Wouldst thou,
Lorenzo,
comprehend
Man's physical and moral end,
To future, to immortal views
Conducted by the faithful muse?
Secure while yet in reason's sight,
For thee she takes her daring flight;
Born up on scientifick wing,
Attempts her boldest note to sing;
For thee those winding tracts t'explore;
Where seldom muse hath dar'd to soar.
But, here, as truth we hope to find,
Be left each vain desire behind.
Be thrown those obstacles aside
Which expectation builds on pride;
While busy hope and bustling care
Erect their castles in the air;
Our fertile wishes safe to hold,
Fertile in pleasure, fame or gold,
A treasure valued at no less
Than man's consummate happiness.
For know, if bliss thy end and aim,
Truth but invalidates thy claim:
Th' exclusive privilege to
know
The all we taste of Heav'n below.
Is this a maxim wits profess?
"That man was born to happiness:
"Tho' tow'rs of hope he fondly raise,
"Their structure lasts him all his days:
"In expectation ev'n possessing
"The better half of ev'ry blessing,
"His bliss for ever in his view,
"Whene'er he pleases to pursue."
My friend, with care such maxims weigh:
Nor run with giddy wits astray.
In search of truth may genius roam;
But bliss, if found, is found at home;
To region, clime nor soil confin'd
This boasted seed of Heav'nly kind.
Ah! vainly boasted, if below
The plant celestial cannot grow!
Say sophists neither more nor less
Than happiness is happiness;
Yet will they boast this state unknown,
This bliss indefinite, their own?
The diff'rence plain 'twixt bliss and woe,
Whate'er we feel we surely know:
What state can, then, be ever thine
Which sense nor science can define.
That man, by others is't confess'd,
Ne'er
is
but always
to be
blest?
Yet would they teach, in moral strain,
How all may happiness attain?
As well who ne'er was bless'd with light
May boast the happiness of sight,
The splendour of the solar ray;
Or teach his comrades blind their way;
As such to thee make ever known
A state of being ne'er their own.
Dost thou to prove my judgment wrong
In answer quote thy fav'rite song?
True bliss, thy
Pope
if we believe,
All hands can reach, all heads conceive:
See
Pope
's essay on man.
The happiness of each confin'd,
In truth, to that of all our kind.
Know terms so gen'ral naught define.
The bliss of
all
nor
yours
nor
mine:
As yet distinctly understood
The
publick
and the
private
good.
Nor doth it prove this maxim right
To say that both in one unite;
Unless their union be so plain
That, seeking one, we both obtain:
Since th'individual, for himself,
Applies to riot, fame or pelf:
In spite of all the wise can say,
We seek our bliss a sep'rate way;
Just as the present maggots bite,
Take our own measures for the right;
Or, having no peculiar whim,
Along the tide of custom swim.
Mean-while, of bliss tho' all dispute,
None leave their darling substitute.
How short of happiness is gold!
The miser cries; yet keeps his hold.
In women, sighs the batter'd rake,
What solid comfort can we take!
Ah! what in wine?
Silenus
asks.
Yet cart the whore; go, stave the casks;
"How shall the sons of
Comus
live,
"If wine nor women life doth give!"
Thus publick happiness our care
But for our own peculiar share:
While sons their father's schemes traduce;
And here all patriotism abuse.
However then the specious face
Of wit may countenance the case,
Bliss inconsistently we call
The happiness of
one
and
all.
Nor is it yet precisely meant
By
good, ease, pleasure
or
content.
Good
might we variously explain.
Ease
is deliv'rance but from pain.
Pleasure
is actual joy confess'd:
And mere
content
but patient rest;
A neutral state, at best and worst,
But negatively blest or curst:
That which our
happiness
we call,
Tho' that nor this, the sum of all.
The world's plain meaning plainly this,
Some constant state of actual bliss.
No matter whether in degree
Alike bestow'd on you or me:
Enough, if, void of fear or pain,
No motive lead us to complain:
Enough, whate'er the mode of joy,
If such that it can never cloy.
Look round the world, and tell me true.
Where is such happiness in view?
From monarchs fled, as sings the bard,
His patron's virtue to reward,
Tell me, in truth, was
St. John
blest?
See essay on man, Ep. 4.
Or did the bitter bard but jest;
Dipping his pen in worse than gall,
An outed statesman
bless'd
to call?
With equal truth the muse might paint
My Lord of
Bolingbroke
a saint;
Run riot o'er his dubious fame,
And dub him with a patriot's name:
So worthy of his country's pràise!
So meek! so holy all his ways!
Nor, tho' to him, to him alone
A state of perfect bliss unknown,
Of each complexion, age, degree,
Mankind as far remov'd as he.
Go, ask, my friend, from door to door,
The high, the low, the rich, the poor;
In court, or cot, if here, or there,
Reside the mortal free from care.
You ask in vain, for joy and strife
Diversify all states of life.
To wield the scythe with sweaty brow,
With wearied arm to guide the plough,
To sow in hope, to reap in joy,
Thine,
labour,
is the sweet employ.
A life of rest with pain t'endure,
To seek in health disease's cure,
To eat the grape, unprun'd the vine,
Laborious
idleness
is thine.
Yet idleness of care complains
And labour quarrels with its pains.
Nor only found, or made, distress;
Because externals fail to bless:
Lodg'd in ourselves the taste, and will,
That make externals good or ill;
No earthly blessing, hence, we find
An equal good to all mankind.
Belmore,
the sober'st thing on earth,
Dreads the broad laugh, and roar of mirth:
While
Clerrio,
with a length of chin,
Protracted by perpetual grin,
Tho'
Socrates
himself pass by,
Must laugh in ridicule or die.
How elegant, how high refin'd
The palate of
Cardella
's mind!
How low, how vulgar
Cotta
's soul,
That feels no rapture in a vole!
See thousands, as in love with strife,
Pursue it, fretting, all their life;
And darken, with the clouds of spleen,
The sky of providence serene:
Wretched to find another eas'd,
And most unhappy when they're pleas'd.
How strange! while some, with patient toil,
Raise comfort on a barren soil
Or pleasure strike, by native dint,
From cruel fortune's hardest flint;
The patriarch like, whose rod, we're told,
Earth's stubborn fetters burst, of old;
When gush'd the stream from
Horeb
's rock,
To water
Israel
's thirsty flock.
Hence not on earth a blessing sent
Gives universally content.
For while so varied is our taste,
Manna itself were show'r'd to waste.
With reason, therefore, we profess
God meant not here our happiness:
Else in the various blessings given
Sure various minds might find their heaven.
If, says Mr.
Pope,
— To all men happiness was meant,
God in externals could not place content.
To me, I must confess, the various conditions of humanlife seem so admirably adapted to the several dispositions ofindividuals, that, if our happiness in this life were intended, the unequal distribution of the gifts of fortune affords themost plausible means to effect it.
But know, as different we find
Each individual's turn of mind,
As little with ourselves we see
Ourselves, at various times, agree.
So oft our views, our tempers change,
As through life's varied scenes we range.
At times, so diff'rent from himself,
The prodigal will hoard his pelf;
Spend greedily the night at play,
To throw next morn his gains away.
At times ev'n misers rob their store,
And give their sixpence to the poor.
At times ev'n trembling cowards fight,
And, desp'rate, put the bold to flight:
While, sick of fighting and of fame,
The brave, like
belgick
lions, tame.
How oft, my friend, in private life,
We love the maid we hate a wife.
How oft the scene, that gives delight
At morn, offends the eye at night.
'Tis not the want of that or this:
Possession is the bane of bliss:
And hence of happiness we see
On earth th' impossibility.
Yet, with an interested view,
Doth still
Lorenzo
truth pursue?
Dost thou suppose th'enlighten'd mind
In truth's researches bliss may find?
That science fancy may restrain,
And fix that weather-cock the brain?
Alas, deceive thy self no more;
But give thy vain pretensions o'er.
For, as a world of fruitless cost
In vain inquiries hath been lost;
A world of labour spent t'attain
To knowledge man may never gain:
So millions all their lives have spent,
Searching for bliss in discontent:
For bliss, which but a little thought
Had told them never could be taught.
Yet still they ask; yet still they run
A race that never can be won.
Thus sought, of yore, projecting fools
The
summum bonum
of the schools;
And wiser heads than those of old
The stone converting all to gold;
Or vain adepts, much wiser still,
To wrest from nature's hand, at will,
Promethean theft, celestial fire;
To animate their wood and wire:
Madmen, that not
Monro
could cure
Of circles and their quadrature,
Of thinking drunken nature reels,
Like a slung coach, on springs and wheels!
Dost thou, instructed in thy youth
To place consummate bliss in
truth,
Conceive it somewhere hidden lies,
Among the learned and the wise;
That hence our bliss or misery flow,
The truth to know or not to know?
In vain the learn'd, in science deep,
In search of
bliss,
their vigils keep;
In vain the universe explore,
Swift as their search, it flies before,
Through ev'ry clime, on ev'ry wind,
And leaves the panting wish behind.
O, tell me, what connection ties
So close the happy and the wise.
Did e'er the sage in wisdom find
The artless infant's peace of mind?
Proud, knowledge, e'er, or boastful art,
Restore to joy the broken heart?
Ah! what avails the truth to know,
When
truth's
the frequent source of woe;
While gilded
fiction's
dazzling rays
With sun-shine beautify our days,
Or, mildly shed, its silver beams,
Reflected, light our nightly dreams;
While pleasure and its laughing train
Dance, by the moon-shine of the brain.
For what is knowledge, but to know
How ignorant our state below?
The more we learn, the more to find,
Beyond our learning, still behind:
Our fruitless wishes to increase,
Whene'er our mental prospects cease?
So far from happiness, my friend,
Is science, in its means, or end.
Sayst thou that bliss the world affect
The smile of God on his elect;
Confin'd to
Abr'am
's faithful seed;
And made dependant on our creed?
Go, ask the saints, to whom are given
The best assurances of Heaven,
The few distinguish'd here on earth
As children of a spiritual birth,
"How gloomy oft a state of grace;
"How often hid their Maker's face;
"How oft, by satan and by sin,
"Sore buffeted the man within."
These all confess beyond the sky
Their blissful heritage doth lie.
Say, is repos'd this Heav'nly trust
Within the bosom of the just,
While virtue, in itself, you call
The happiness of one and all?
Pretending still, "tho' yours and mine
"No partial mode of bliss define;
"Yet that our diff'rent tastes unite
"In meaning well and thinking right:
"An universal moral this,
"Conducting all mankind to bliss!"
Alas, what sophistry to tell
Of "thinking right, and meaning well:"
Pope
Unless this rectitude of thought
With perspicuity be taught;
This honest meaning plainly shown;
So oft admir'd! so little known!
At virtue if we're left to guess,
What is't to say 'tis happiness?
The way to
virtue
as to bliss;
If dubious
that
as doubtful
this.
How fruitless therefore but to know
"Virtue is happiness below!"
Sayst thou, mankind are all agreed
That happiness is virtue's meed?
The service of the work inquire,
And by the labour rate the hire.
Now virtue some to
fact
confine,
While others place it in
design.
These
blest but for the good they
do;
And
those
for all they
have in view.
But, if by virtue understood
The mere intent of doing good,
Those fully virtuous may be held,
Who ne'er one lawless passion quell'd;
Whom ne'er temptation led astray,
Beyond the tenour of their way;
A sober path by stoicks trod;
Nor friends to man, nor foes to God.
Consistent with a state of rest,
If virtue's centred in the breast,
As happy those may surely live
Who nothing give nor have to give,
As those who taste, in ey'ry sense,
Th' exertion of benevolence.
Some seeming diff'rence yet we find.
What pangs affect the tender mind?
What exquisite sensations rise,
To hear the orphan's piteous cries;
To feel the widow's piercing woe;
When no relief our wants bestow?
Doth virtue here rejoice the heart
As when the gen'rous ease impart,
When purest transports warm the breast,
That glows to succour the distress'd?
And yet, my friend, 'twere wond'rous hard,
If bliss the virtuous rich reward,
In poverty that virtue's zeal
Should double all the pangs we feel;
Each gen'rous sigh, each social tear,
But render want the more severe.
To virtue, therefore, if the deed
Our best designs must yet succeed,
Granting that happy ev'ry mind
In such proportion as its kind,
Here in
externals
do we place
The happiness of human race:
Enabled to relieve distress
As wealth, or pow'r, ourselves possess;
For bliss capacitated more
As blest with fortune's worldly store.
Fix'd, by this scheme, the blissful state,
Exclusive, to the rich and great:
The virtuous poor, but innocent,
Claim, at th' utmost, bare content.
Besides, if individuals blest
As sharers only with the rest,
True happiness with thee to call
Not merely that of
one
but
all,
What is inactive virtue's use?
Can it to social good conduce?
Can it, thus fruitless and confin'd,
Be call'd a blessing to mankind?
If then we judge so much amiss
Of virtue, and of virtuous bliss,
If faith, tho' crown'd with alms and pray'rs,
Hath all its pangs, hath all its cares,
While, ev'n from knowledge, prospects rise,
That make us miserably wise,
His perfect happiness to reach,
No morals mortal man can teach:
Still Heav'n's best vot'ries must confess
No blessings here compleatly bless:
A compound strange of bliss and woe
Man's variable state below.
Some absent something ours to crave,
Ev'n from the cradle to the grave!
How idly, then, employ'd the mind
In search of that we cannot find.
For human bliss stands never still;
Our good insep'rable from ill;
Virtue, says Mr.
Pope,
is the
—Point where human bliss stands still,
And tastes the good without the fall to ill.
Whilst all of pain and pleasure share,
Their hour of joy, their hour of care,
Adapted to each sev'ral state;
Fix'd and determinate as fate.
The world my friend, an ample field,
Of such examples store doth yield.
How throbs the infant's little breast,
Beneath a load of care oppress'd;
The care that issues with a sigh;
The tear yet standing in the eye;
Or, caught in laughter's dimple sleek,
Dry'd up in stealing down the cheek.
See next, among, the sachel'd crowd,
Bold as a hero and as proud,
The little tyrant of his class;
How happy! till condemn'd to parse,
Or sob beneath the weightier curse
Of scanning
Lily
's crabbed verse.
However puerile this example may seem, there has been more than one instance of a school-boy's having actually been guilty of suicide; in order to avoid the discipline of the rod, or the ferula.
In youth how glows the vital fire
'Tween expectation and desire;
Our sanguine hopes our awkard fears,
All suiting unexperienc'd years.
Still riper joys do manhood bless,
When full-blown fortune we possess?
We riot on the joyous store,
Till health and strength can charm no more;
When disappointment and chagrin
Retaliate all our joys with spleen.
Proportion'd next to wasted age,
Insipid joys and peevish rage,
Tho' dim th' exhausted passions burn,
Take, to our latest gasp, their turn.
Thus relative, my friend, we find
The pains and pleasures of mankind:
Adapted all, in due degree,
To human sensibility.
For see, no more alive to smart
Than dead to joy the hard-of-heart:
As far from rapture as despair
The fretful family of care.
Not sickness, pain, nor death itself
Avarus
dreads like loss of pelf:
While
Lavish
offers an estate
To staunch a cut, ere yet too late,
Dispel the head-ach, or remove
Th' effects of his intemp'rate love.
Was ever yet the child of mirth
Intensely blest, or curst, on earth?
Ah no! how lightly feel a pain
The light-of-heart, or light-of-brain!
The man, so happy as to think,
Life's bitter potion born to drink!
Behold the foolish, weak and blind
The sprightliest, merriest of mankind;
While suffers oft superior sense,
Ev'n from its own pre-eminence:
Those follies that the wise: annoy
The destitute-of-wisdom's joy.
The blockhead naturally free
From cares thy knowledge brings on thee,
While Heav'n your daily toil to seek,
Poor
Ralpho
works but once a week:
When left his plough and worldly cares,
He plies his sunday's task at pray'rs.
Nor puzzled he in truth's research,
Laid all his burthen on the church;
The friendly church, by Heav'n design'd
To help the weak, to lead the blind,
To check the rash, to warm the cold,
T'engage the young, t'amuse the old,
Th' unthinking from themselves to save,
And bring them calmly to the grave.
Blest ignorance! from care so free,
Hath it,
Lorenzo,
charms for thee?
Wouldst thou to science, empty name
If void of bliss resign thy claim?
Be like the ass, that plodding goes,
Nor looks beyond his bridled nose?
For me—O, rather should I ask
Life's most laborious, abject task.
Would ev'n the meanest lot sustain;
Bear ev'ry tolerable pain:
To emp'ricks would intrust my cure;
Ev'n to be pitied might endure:
Nay, plague me, Heav'n, in ev'ry sense,
Ere take my share of reason hence;
Of science ere my soul deprive,
My little portion, whilst alive.
Yet dost thou ignorance despise?
The joys of knowledge hence arise.
So strange so little understood
The varied source of mortals' good!
To Heav'n my grateful vows be paid
That man in human frailty's made;
That grief and ignorance my lot;
In joy and science since forgot;
Or best remember'd in the taste
They give improvement's rich repast.
O say, industrious querist, say,
What raptures court you on the way;
What views delight, from time, to time,
As the steep hills of art you climb.
Such transports ne'er had fir'd my breast,
If born of sciences possess'd,
As when, by want of knowledge fir'd,
To nature's lore I late aspir'd;
By slow degrees enlighten'd grew,
Her volume op'ning to my view;
To the weak mind as knowledge given;
Knowledge, that wings the soul for Heaven.
Lorenzo,
is this doctrine strange?
Seest thou not, while the seasons change,
How much, as each in contrast felt,
We freeze with cold, by heat we melt.
Thus exquisite our sense of woe
As more refin'd our pleasures grow:
Pleasure and pain, as light and shade,
By one the other still display'd.
Didst never want? to thee denied
The bliss of being satisfied;
In constant fulness but enjoye'd
Th' insipid good of which we're cloy'd.
Say, plenty gives thee bread more white,
It blunts the edge of appetite;
Or, giving wine, malignly first
Robs thee, distasteful, of thy thirst.
How sunk, and terrible, to thee
The hollow, eye of poverty!
While
Villius
meets her with, a smile,
And sings, or whistles all the while.
Tho' worn his hands, perplex'd, his head,
He relishes the sweets of bread;
Nay patient sees, in want itself,
His crustless cupboard's vacant shelf:
Full many a time, in pleasant rue,
Dancing for joy without a shoe.
Is
Fortunatus
rich and gay?
Curst with the modish itch of play;
Bubbled at
White
's, through lust of gain;
Or jockey'd round
New-Market
plain;
See with his barb his manors fly;
His leaseholds totter with the die;
Braving the storm of many a cast,
His oaks a bet malignant blast,
His card-built villas, one and all,
Like infant architecture, fall.
From sharpers, creditors and duns,
Not half the peril
Villius
runs;
Whom all the world to trust refuse;
Who nothing owns he dreads to lose.
Ah me! what threat'ning danger nigh?
Why swells the tear in
Delia
's eye?
Eclips'd the fairest of the fair
By sad misfortune's drooping air;
Delia
on whom kind
Nature
smil'd,
Ev'n at the birth her fav'rite child,
When, all the graces to combine,
She cloath'd them in one form divine;
Bestowing grandeur, wit and wealth,
And fortune's best of bounties, health:
Nay, adding, in her gen'rous fit,
Good-nature even to her wit.
With all these blessings yet unblest,
Ah, tell me, fair one, why distress'd.
Alas! alas! the belle's reply
"Of
Brilliante
's birth-day suit I die.
You smile at misery like this.
Match it with
Delia
's sense of bliss.
In rapture ever, with the gay,
To shine at concert, masque or play;
Her greatest happiness to boast
Her name the fopling's reigning toast:
The all in life her wish regards
Summ'd up in fashions, routs and cards.
Ah, then, how pow'rful to distress
Th' important article of dress!
So deeply some may cares affect,
Those trifling cares that you neglect,
Half the solicitude we see
Ridiculous to you and me?
Others there are as lightly hold
Dangers, at which our blood runs cold.
Lo where, beneath th' impending cliff
The Norway fowler moors his skiff;
Or, desp'rate, fifty fathoms high
Suspended, seems himself to fly;
While thus, from rock to rock, he swings;
And, blythe, his summer's ditty sings.
As blythe the sea-boy furls the sail,
Regardless of the blust'ring gale;
Nor winds, nor waves, disturb his sleep,
Amid the horrours of the deep.
The cordial draught, the downy bed
Had ne'er reviv'd the drooping head,
Had sickness pale, and fainting grief
Ne'er wish'd for wearied nerves relief.
See
Belmont
on the sofa laid;
What racking pains his limbs invade!
Take half his gout, the respite given
He calls a blissful taste of heaven.
Give but a youth, dispersing wealth,
Who riots on the bloom of health,
That blissful part, which yet remains;
And his a mortal's bitter'st pains.
Pains which no aggravation know!
Yet, so comparative our woe,
Inflict them when
Cleora
's kiss,
Kind earnest of approaching bliss,
Hath rais'd the glowing lover's fire
To flaming raptures of desire;
Lo, disappointment joins the curse,
And turns this
worst
affliction
worse.
Correct ideas let us gain.
Our sense of joy we owe to pain;
So strange a paradox is this!
And mis'ry to our sense of bliss;
While such our varying state below,
Ev'n joy degen'rates into woe;
And pains, in sufferance, by degrees,
On their own pangs engender ease;
Their antidote, like scorpions, bring,
T' expel the poison of their sting.
The tension of th' extended nerve,
Say Phisiologists, may serve,
The means of pleasure and of pain,
This seeming paradox t' explain.
As strung the harp with trembling wire,
So brac'd with nerves the human lyre,
While such in tune, these sages say,
The smiling hours in concert play:
But if, in change, too lax or tense;
Health strikes no more the keys of sense:
But, tremblingly alive all o'er,
The tortur'd strings in discord roar:
While sickness, with her harpy claws,
Stranger to each harmonious cause,
Labours, benumb'd, the jarring strain,
That stuns our ear with deaf'ning pain.
Nor yet can health too oft repeat
Its musick, howsoever sweet;
While, by degrees, lo, ev'ry string,
Depriv'd of its elastick spring,
In gen'ral lassitude, full soon
The whole machine grows out of tune.
Should, also, passion, sense or art
Wind up too high the nervous part;
With noise the notes tumultuous tire;
Or breaking strings unman the lyre.
Of pain or pleasure on our frame
Th' effects, hence, frequently the same;
Thus, full of gladness or of grief,
In tears we find the same relief;
Alike the feeble nerve destroy
Exquisite pain, extatick joy.
The bandit, stretch'd upon the wheel,
Th' extreme of torture ne'er can feel;
But, cruelty disarming, lies
Or dead to sense, or really dies.
So, rapture never meant to bless,
Ev'n joy grows pain when in excess.
Indulg'd to print the burning kiss
On
Chloe
's lips, how fierce the bliss!
How keen the torture of her charms,
Caress'd, to pant within her arms,
Melting in fulness of desire,
Stretch'd on the rack of bliss, t'expire!
Thus constitutional, below,
Is all our bliss, is all our woe:
Each holding, intimately join'd,
Alternate empire o'er the mind.
Like
Persian
monarchs, hardly known
Ere tumbled headlong from the throne,
Precarious and as short its sway,
Depos'd and sceptred in a day,
Pleasure
begins its fickle reign,
And tyrannizes into
pain:
When, as to cruel pain we bow,
Its rod grows light we know not how.
Ah, cruel blow to human pride!
Is pain and pleasure thus allied,
That all the sweets of life grow sour
Within the transitory hour!
Complains,
Lorenzo?
darts behind
No ray of comfort on his mind?
If thus with varied joy and strife
Diversified all states of life;
If human being cannot know
A constant state of bliss or woe;
Worn by sharp mis'ry to the bones,
While grief with intermission groans,
And meagre want, half fed, the while,
Grins forth her grateful, ghastly smile;
Tho' vain our hopes of bliss, as vain
Our fears of unremitting pain:
Absurd the mischief-making care
That leads us blindly to despair.
EPISTLE THE SIXTH.
ARGUMENT.
On abstract good and evil—The physical perfection of the material universe, and the moral harmony observable in the dispensations of Providience.
SUMMARY
THE inquiries, of philosophers into the abstract cause of evil have hitherto been attended with little success. Indeed, no such abstract evil exists. For, whatever calamities human life be subject to, their
evil
depends merely on our own s;ensibility. Even physical evils, which are the least controvertible, are evidently relative to their effects on the sufferings, or enjoyments, of mankind. Whence they must not be accounted abstract evils, or real defects in the general system of things: of which we have at present but a
partial
view; and therefore cannot tell how far apparent imperfections may conduce to the perfection of the
whole.
That human life is subject, nevertheless, to palpable evils cannot be denied: but it should be consider'd that, as such evils are but temporary, and are evil but in proportion to the pleasure, or good, by which they are contrasted, we are not sensible of any abstracted evil, unless a state of humanity, on the whole, be attended with a greater portion, of pain than pleasure. This is asserted by many; but is experimentally false. Indeed, on a fair and impartial estimate, our sufferings and enjoyments seem to stand on an equal ballance. Hence, also, if there be no abstract physical evil in the universe, there is as little reason for us to hold the existence of physical good; or to maintain that happiness is the privilege of human life. That "whatever
is
is
right,
" with respect to the whole, is allow'd; but that it is therefore
good
is another consideration:
goodness
being a term relative to the happiness of mankind, and not applicable to that general system. The famous principle of
the BEST
is therefore futile and frivolous—As to
moral
good and evil: we owe a sense of them purely to
physical:
for had mankind felt neither pain nor pleasure, they would never, from the light of nature, have acquir'd the ideas of moral good or ill. Those actions, therefore, are morally good which give rise to more pleasure than pain; and morally bad,
vice versa:
Innocence being, strictly speaking, neither good nor evil; and indeed inconsistent with a state of
action.
Moral evil appears, hence, to be, also, merely relative to
man;
and can by no means be consider'd as a defect in the designs of Providence; unless we can be so absurd as to suppose it in the power of created beings to counterwork the intentions of their supreme creator. On the other hand, moral good is equally relative, and can have no effect on the happiness of the first cause, or plead any abstract merit with the Deity. Moral good and evil, however, in the agent, is necessarily attended with temporary happiness and misery; in the distribution of which, also, agreeable to relative merit, it is not improbable that impartial justice is done, even in this life, in the perfect dispensations of Providence. Our hopes or apprehensions, nevertheless, of a future state are not hereby cut off. On the contrary, this life may only be preparatory to a future; where the virtuous and vicious may be very differently dispos'd of in the scale of existence. But, whatever be our lot hereafter, it rests on the good pleasure of our creator: into whose hands philosophy calmly resigns the hidden concerns of futurity.
EPISTLE THE
SIXTH.
IS there who teach that human woe
Must from a source abstracted flow;
Existing in creation's plan,
Some active ill the curse of man;
Some imperfection, or offence,
In physicks or in providence?
The question old unanswer'd lies.
"Whence did the curse of evil rise?"
By
Wolfius
left and twenty more,
As puzzling as 'twas left before,
To God or devil still assign'd
The cause of ill by human-kind.
In disobedience to his God,
Did man himself call down the rod?
Or did th' arch-fiend, from Heav'n that fell,
Inspire the mischief to rebel?
Yet, sure, if pow'r preventive given,
No angel e'er had fell from Heaven;
Man had no tempter known to vice;
Serpent, nor
Eve,
in Paradise.
Lorenzo,
in the pride of sense,
Instruction
's deem'd impertinence.
She, therefore, daughter of the wise,
Hath long been shelter'd in disguise;
Ent'ring, beneath the mask of sport,
The presence, tho' forbid the court:
So fond with young delight to stray,
And moralize the wanton's play,
That ev'n her precepts still prevail
In ev'ry fav'rite, gossip's tale.
Yet so that those who seek to learn
With ease the naked truth discern;
To genius but a pleasing task
To sport with allegory's mask.
The moral, then, from tales deduct;
And let philosophy instruct.
Angelick truths let angels scan:
Ours is the scrutiny of
man.
Ours but in reason's bounded course
Allow'd to try our native force;
Confin'd within life's little space
The fleetest genius at the race,
In vain we urge beyond the goal
Th' ideal coursers of the soul.
Art thou, my friend, so ill at ease
That all thy prospects here displease?
Dost thou, in peevishness or pain,
Of nature's system all complain?
Of blunders there, confusion here,
Too distant Heav'n, and hell too near!
In mood so splenetick, my friend,
Say what those evils that offend:
Thy doubts propose, thy questions ask,
And take omnisciency to task.
Giv'n thy sagacity offence
By all thou seest of providence,
The constitution prone to blame
Of nature's universal frame,
Dost thou Heav'n's boasted care deny
When tempests sweep along the sky;
Thy feather'd geese when whirlwinds bear
Aloft, and scatter, wide in air;
Or from the hills impetuous rains
Descend and strip th' autumnal plains?
Concluding the machin'ry vile
When earthquakes shake our stable isle,
When
Etna
and
Vesuvius
flame;
To nature each a burning shame!
Finds thy philosophy as soon
Faulty th' attraction of the moon,
When death resistless, roaring rides
In triumph o'er the swelling tides,
Or, bathing in destruction, drowns
Flocks, herds and men and helpless towns;
Or bears them off some mountain steep
All headlong down, to glut the deep?
Or is thy wiser censure bent
Against some comet's dire event?
In time to come, time out of mind,
To fall into the sun design'd;
Suspicious that, if planets turn
To comets, ours at length may burn;
And we be doom'd, some sultry day,
To his devouring flames a prey!
Lorenzo,
is this strain admir'd,
Here mayst thou rail till sense be tir'd.
But judge not thou, as sophists vain,
Of gen'ral good by partial gain:
Thinking when cross'd our stubborn will
Such is a providential ill.
For know, no abstract cause exists
And battles in creation's lists,
A formal enemy to man,
Since nature's tournaments began,
Inflam'd with enmity and power
God's human likeness to devour.
No—'tis impossible a cause
Should counteract creation's laws,
The hand of providence arrest,
Or IIcav'n's determin'd pow'r contest:
As one or other must prevail,
And one, or both together, fail.
But nature knows no real strife,
However jarring human life,
From evil and from errour free;
These only relative to thee.
In icy chains let winter bind
The glebe untrod by human-kind,
Fierce light'nings flash, and thunders roll
Their horrours only round the pole;
Let
Malstrooms
roar, and
Heclas
blaze
Where fools nor cowards stand to gaze:
Let islands drown; let mountains melt;
These are no evils till they're felt.
'Mid southern seas and lands unknown
Should agonizing nature groan,
There only ease her future th
oes,
And harmless horrours. round disclose;
Earthquakes would lose their evil name,
And Heav'n no longer bear the blame;
Tho' evils now we loudly call
Lima
's, and
Ulysippo
's,
Lisbon,
so called from its suppos'd founder,
Ulysses.
fall.
Lorenzo,
of creation's plan
But parts are visible to man;
Whence, ign'rant of their sep'rate use,
We think them subject to abuse:
Tho' all with art consummate join,
Conducive to Heav'n's main design.
As parts to complex engines prove,
Inspir'd by mechanism to move,
This retrograde, and that direct,
In diff'rent modes to one effect,
So, howsoe'er they clash to sense,
The sev'ral springs of providence,
In concert, at their Maker's will,
Their ends harmoniously fulfil:
Upheld the weight, let fall the rod,
As urges the first mover, God.
How blind are, then, the smatt'ring fools,
Just taught their geometrick rules,
The simple use of rule and line,
To these who nature would confine;
Its laws who else capricious call,
Or say "it acts by none at all;
"The macrocosm's vast engine made
"By one that knew not half his trade;
"Its bungling engineer at hand,
"To help it forward, at a stand."
Impious! like
Marli
's, doth it take
The pains to mend it did to make,
Requiring endless cost and care
To hold in tenable repair?
Ah! no, howe'er to us it seem,
Creation is a perfect scheme.
Lorenzo,
let not words deceive.
All imperfection's relative;
Since from conceiv'd amendments came
The patch-work we perfection name;
A term for something understood
Productive still of mortals' good.
But, of perfection absolute
All nature is, beyond dispute.
For all from God is here deriv'd,
And all is perfect God contriv'd.
"Man surely perfect then" you cry.
As man, most perfect, I reply.
The creature of his Maker's will,
Form'd his good pleasure to fulfill,
Destin'd in th' universal plan
To fill his space, and act, as
man.
What tho' on earth the human mind
Involv'd in ignorance we find,
Impassion'd, fickle, giv'n to pride,
Nor resting e'er self-satisfied,
Doth pow'r comparative t'improve
Perfection positive remove?
As well imperfect might we say
The rising sun at early day,
Since with superior heat and light
It blazes in meridian height.
Form'd with progressive pow'rs to rise
From out the dust to tread the skies,
Perfect as such humanity
However lowly in degree.
How ignorant and weak are those
Who nature's authour, then, suppose
In providence remains a spy,
To guard his work with, watchful eye;
From fallen angels' base intent
The direful outrage to prevent;
To rescue, or preserve, his plan
From that prodigious creature, man.
Like the young steed, that scours the plain,
Its nature wild and needs a rein?
Or halts it like a founder'd jade;
Lame by her frequent stumbling made?
Perhaps,
Lorenzo,
some mistake
Concerning
providence
we make;
The pow'rs of nature to divide
From its imaginary guide:
For, if creation has, in fact,
Been long ago a finish'd act,
What end doth lab'ring time pursue?
Or what hath providence in view?
For sure thou wilt not take the side
Of those, whose ignorance and pride
Maintain the universe design'd
Merely to gratify mankind:
A stage, as on a stroler's cart,
Where drolls itin'rant play their part,
In grinning mirth, or brawling strife:
The tragi-comedy of life!
Was, then, heav'n's wond'rous pow'r display'd;
This system in perfection made,
Only to wear itself away?
Stupendous frame! for mere decay!
Its worlds to wander through the void,
Destroying till themselves destroy'd;
Or, in some future, fabled, days,
To take imaginary blaze
At flames, that all to ruin turn,
Annihilating as they burn?
Risk'd, then, the censure of my wit,
I hold the world unfinish'd yet:
Time building what Heav'n's wisdom plann'd,
Creation's work ev'n yet in hand.
Through nature's scenes in order range;
See all things in continual change;
All to some point progressive run,
To do, as well as be undone.
Existing for so short a space,
Thousands we know but by their place,
Which chang'd, by changing form, we say
The things themselves are pass'd away.
No proofs of
being
objects bring,
Whose
essence
ever on the wing,
Flown from their
forms,
ere yet defin'd,
Leaves no identity behind.
But waving this, yet see we here
No abstract cause of ill, to fear:
Since on the feelings of mankind
Depends the ev'ry ill we find:
Whence, tho' our suff'rings ill we call,
They're no abstracted cause at all:
For, stript creation of mankind,
No evil would be left behind.
To this will cavillers reply?
"We ask not where those causes lie;
"If in
externals
be th'offence,
"Or in the
pravity
of
sense:
"That real ill exists is plain,
"While man is sensible of
pain."
In answer, my
Lorenzo,
here,
No vaunting stoicism fear:
Nor think thy friend so madly wise
T'affect his mis'ries to despise.
I ne'er presume that point to teach,
Nor 'gainst the voice of nature preach:
None feel more tenderly than I:
Mine the soft heart and wat'ry eye,
The sanguine hopes, the groundless fears;
Still unsubdued by sense or years;
Ah, too susceptible of pain
When vice, or folly, but complain!
Yet, ev'n while tears of anguish flow,
I hold no abstract ill we know.
'Tis true, my friend, no man alive
Could, in his senses, gravely strive
The wretch in torture to persuade
Of evil not to be afraid;
The murd'rer, mangled on the wheel;
To smile at harmless rope and steel;
Or that the blows, that loitering kill,
Cannot be physically ill.
Absurd the argument and vain!
Since all we know of
ill
is
pain.
And yet, as, neither griev'd nor pain'd,
Of evil man had ne'er complain'd,
If, relative, our bliss and woe
Reciprocally ebb and flow,
'Tis palpable that joy and strife
Are but the modes of human life;
Which varied with consummate skill
Proves, on the whole, nor good nor ill.
Sayst thou the learned are agreed
The ills of life the good exceed?
Lorenzo,
peevish, sick, or vain,
How nat'ral is it to complain!
But sure experience here denies
This thread-bare maxim of the wife.
Behold the weak, the blind, the lame,
The sons of poverty and shame,
The wretch, expiring by degrees
By amputations or disease;
Such whose vile lot, the world their foe,
Contempt and beggary below:
Shouldst thou to this, or that, propose
In death a cure for all their woes;
Tell 'em, "oppress'd with human strife,
"Wide stand the num'rous doors of life,
"With open arms, the wretch to save,
"Rest welcomes mis'ry to the grave."
How few your recipé will try;
Tho' dying piece-meal loth to dye.
Nor merely from the fear of
worse,
Tenacious of a
present
curse.
For say annihilation here
The all poor mortals have to fear:
How few would yet their ills incline
Their sense of being to resign;
To part, on terms like these, with pain,
With pleasure ne'er to meet again;
Ev'n nature shudd'ring at the thought,
To sink inconscious into naught.
In mere existence sure mankind
Must then intrinsick pleasure find;
Some good equivalent must feel
To such suppos'd excess of ill;
Since thus, by death, so loth to part
An aching head and bleeding heart.
May not, at least, all human woe
Be ballanc'd with our joys below.
Dost thou,
Lorenzo,
doubt of this?
How dost thou measure earthly bliss?
'Tis not by extasy alone
Thy actual share of joy is known:
Duration
adds to the degree
As much as its
intensity.
Joy for a moment's space how small!
Pain instantaneous, none at all;
Through life continued little less
Ev'n bare
content
than happiness:
The joyous extasy of bliss
Dilating rarified to this.
Be it on individuals tried;
Each needs but to be satisfied:
The longing wish, the sigh is o'er
When once content; we ask no more.
Thus equal joy we often taste
In short-liv'd pleasures, snatch'd in haste,
As others, or, when raptur'd less,
For years, ev'n we, ourselves, possess.
Hence oft asserted in dispute
That time ideas constitute;
Sense of duration so confin'd
To that which passes in the mind.
Th'expectant lover thinks, in rage,
His
Stellia's
absent hour an age;
While short and sweet the moments fly.
When love and she sit smiling by:
Nor giv'n their epithets in vain.
To fleeting joy, and lingering pain,
In minutes flown, each joyful day,
Each sad one whiled in hours away.
Nay, tho' of life tenacious all,
Longevity no bliss we call.
In diff'rent animals, at least,
While ev'n the less the greater's feast,
'Tis probable their, joys and strife
Are suited to their term of life.
Whence equal pleasure, equal pain,
May long-liv'd elephants sustain
With young ephemerons, whose flight,
At noon beginning, ends at night:
During which momentary space,
They rise, love, battle and embrace,
Flutt'ring around, till, out of breath,
They drop into the arms of death.
From self-experience dost thou rate
The real hardship of thy fate?
Art thou with ev'ry friend at strife?
Seest thou no gentle joy in life?
Dost thou no fav'rite scheme possess,
To build contemplative success?
Hast thou no hope; no good dost choose,
A good thou wouldst not die to lose?
Thy day, thus clouded at the dawn,
Will brighter shine, its clouds withdrawn:
Or, is thy morn of sun-shine past,
With clouds thy ev'ning's overcast:
Wouldst of its brightness know th'amount?
Bring morn and ev'ning to account.
Stands nature then, so long abus'd,
Of abstract evil thus excus'd;
As little truth is understood
By those, who hold all nature
good.
"Whatever is, is right." —it may.
But therefore
good
we cannot say;
Unless some perfect bliss we see
Arise from partial misery.
In spite of truth, in reason's spite
When vex'd, or pain'd, we all deny't:
Ne'er, till the pain be o'er, confessing
That
was,
which never
is,
a blessing,
The term's, then, here misunderstood,
Right's
not equivocal to
good;
Goodness
adapted and confin'd
To th' appetites of human-kind;
The
right,
unknown to you or me:
Tho' sure what
is
is fit to
be.
Let
Plato,
then, or
Leibnitz
prate
Of goodness influencing fate;
Or idle sophisters contest
Their boasted principle
the best:
By disputants, on either side,
The partial term is misapplied.
But should we even suppose the term to be us'd with propriety in this case, it remains to be prov'd that two different systems cannot be equally good, before we subscribe to the doctrine of
Leibnitz
or
Plato, viz.
that out of an infinite variety of possible worlds, God hath chosen, or could not but choose, the
best.
That God is good they know full well;
But what his goodness none can tell;
Unless to man, his kindness shown
Heav'n's good depends upon our own.
Lorenzo,
merely to mankind
Thus evil
physical
confin'd;
Of
moral
next, a puzzling task,
An explanation dost thou ask?
Sayst thou "Heav'n's care no more extends
"To physical than moral ends:
"The same the providential power,
"That rains the soft, refreshing shower,
"That, in the womb of teeming earth,
"Its atoms quickens into birth,
"Doth in the moral scene connect
"The cause and consequent effect;
"On virtue peace of heart bestows;
"Softens the good man's casual woes;
"Abandons vice to fell despair;
"Or plagues with heart-corroding care:"
Concluding hence "that moral ill,
"Opposing nature's righteous will,
"Aloud for Heav'n's dread vengeance calls,
"The curse that on the guilty falls."
So far
Lorenzo,
I with thee,
In part most readily agree;
That vice will leave a sting behind,
And virtue its reward shall find.
Yet all, with good
St. Paul,
confess
"Without a law we can't transgress."
Now nature's law is Heav'n's command,
Whose will no mortal can withstand.
How! lives earth's animated clod
To contravene the will of God?
As well, advent'rous of his neck,
The laws of gravity to break,
Presumptuous man might seek to fly,
A creeping earth-worm, to the sky;
Or don the
bishop's
winged shoon,
To trip it yarely to the moon.
Bishop
Wilkins
conceiv'd a possibility of our flying up to the moon; and that it would, in time, become as common for a traveller to call for his wings, as it was for his cotemporaries to call for their boots.
What curse soe'er then vice provoke,
Creation's laws can ne'er be broke.
But know, by
physical
alone
Is
moral
good or evil known;
For, had not vice the pow'r to vex,
Its evil never would perplex.
Each moral thus a partial ill,
Permitted by th'eternal will;
To mortals relative th'offence
And punishments of providence.
Lorenzo,
state the matter clear.
Be pain and pleasure strangers here.
Strangers to pleasure and to pain,
Induce what motives to complain?
Suppose we, then, in nature's plan,
T'exist th'automaton of man,
Rising from senseless matter's arms,
Where perfect rest nor grieves, nor charms;
Should Heav'n a consciousness bestow,
Subject to good or ill below;
Not real pain or pleasure give,
But only make the form to live:
As yet from all reflection clear,
Unnerv'd by hope, unaw'd by fear,
Suppose to action thus consign'd
This naked, unaffected mind.
Lorenzo,
with precision hence
Let us infer the consequence.
Ere yet existed moral ill,
The first sole agent Was the
will:
Reason without the pow'r to act,
To censure or advise a fact;
As from experience naught it knew,
Of good or bad, or false or true:
For reason its conclusion draws
From similar effect and cause;
No instinct, faculty or sense,
Insuring actual innocence,
That bids us virtue's steps pursue,
Or points to bliss it never knew:
Else giving reason here had Heaven
No less than actual pleasure given:
This not suppos'd—hence reason's use
Some known effect must introduce.
Now, as innate if we maintain
A love of bliss and hate of pain,
Directed as the passions fir'd,
The will to pleasure first aspir'd;
The moral agent bound to chuse
From pleasure's most immediate views.
But, prone to censure and complain,
Suppose our first sensation pain;
Let pain or pleasure be attain'd,
Of both an equal sense was gain'd,
As the first tree of knowledge bore
Of good and evil equal store;
For when the mind one pleasure knew,
Its neutral state of
rest
withdrew:
Pleasure and pain, by contrast known,
Criteria of each other grown.
Hence felt th'initiated mind
The sting which pleasure left behind,
And reason did to act commence
On th'information of the sense;
Seeing the passions ebb and flow,
Now swoln with bliss, now sunk in woe,
Trac'd out the bounds, extremes between,
Of innocence that golden
mean.
But ah, the fluctuating tide
Of passion doth this
mean
deride:
Consistent only, 'tis confess'd,
With nature in a state of
rest.
Here then from moral
action
came
The necessary ill, we blame:
Running self-love, in full career,
Reason her guide not always near,
Her satisfaction oft pursuing,
Tho' at her own and others' ruin.
Pronounce we, hence, a moral ill
Th'indulgence of the human will,
Whene'er from such indulgence flows
More pain than pleasure it bestows.
In guilt original involv'd,
Here see the wond'rous myst'ry solv'd.
To the first man no more confin'd
Than passions found in ev'ry mind,
Is, the plain cause of moral woe,
Sin, human frailty here below.
Lorenzo,
evil understood,
The die's reverse is moral good:
Whate'er more pleasure yields than pain
Not, indeed, solely to the agent, but to mankind, or the moral world in general.
The name of goodness doth obtain.
Unsatisfied,
Lorenzo,
yet,
Dost thou lost happiness regret?
Doth, from our plan of morals, seem
Yet providence no perfect scheme,
Because, perplex'd with fear or pain,
Ev'n virtue covets bliss in vain?
Dost thou against the cause object?
"'Tis disproportion'd to th' effect,
"Thus in th'intemp'rance of the will
"To place the source of moral ill:
"Our passions but a nat'ral cause,
"Obedient to creation's laws,
"Here palpably too innocent
"The cause of mis'ry to be meant."
Must I repeat it o'er again?
From pleasure flows our sense of pain.
Through life, each other's contrast made,
Dependant these as light and shade.
Whence, tho' to moderation join'd
Content's serenity of mind,
While vice but sports with higher glee
To sink as low in misery,
Proportion'd to the guilty joy
The pangs intemperance annoy,
Yet, on the whole, no abstract ill
Doth here confront th'eternal will;
Of evil all th'effected strife
But relative to human life.
Sayst thou indeed "if man confin'd
"To fill the place by Heav'n assign'd,
"But partially to rise, or fall,
"Why feels he misery at all?"
Another question answers this.
What title have mankind to bliss?
During thy life if, man and boy,
Thy share of both thou mayst enjoy;
If perfect rest the certain mean
Our pleasures and our pains between;
Null'd
the
momentum
of our pain;
Who shall of providence complain?
Seest thou incumbering the ground,
The barren fig-trees flourish round;
While virtue stands the brunt of vice,
And knaves possess fools' paradise?
'Tis here indeed our errour lies.
Our virtue we too highly prize;
And adequate rewards to find,
Create them fondly to our mind:
Not satisfied on Heav'n to trust,
Or think its dispensations just,
Unless his conduct God submit
To our investigating wit;
Here toiling, as an humble drudge,
For man, his critick, lord and judge.
What merit in thy Maker's eye
That thou vain man art six foot high?
To Heav'n must all, with shame, agree
Unprofitable servants we;
Unworthy of celestial dress
The rags of human righteousness:
The all that virtue has to boast
Claiming the world's regard, at most.
As virtue here so vice depends.
Ourselves our guilt alone offends.
For know, proud man, no act of thine
Renders defective God's design:
No pow'r to human frailty given
To injure unpreventing Heaven.
Presume not at so high a price
To rate th' iniquity of vice.
Nor let the vainly-virtuous fool,
Projecting Heav'n by line and rule,
Sore lash'd and wasting to the bone,
The crimes of health and ease t'atone,
Conceive by want of rest and meat
Th' eternal purpose to defeat.
Presume not at so vile a rate
To hold th' omnipotence of fate.
Yet who shall say that guilt is free,
Or promise vice impunity?
Since 'tis so plain the sting of woe
To joy inordinate doth grow;
And none from virtue's paths would stray
If pleasure did not lead the way.
Can virtue also hence despair?
Since virtue's providence's care;
Compensing pleasure due to pain,
And this nor that bestow'd in vain.
Let fools, when hard their present lot,
Think distant Heav'n has earth forgot;
In discontent aloud complain,
"That all our trust in Heav'n is vain,"
Pretending God the world protects,
And yet its sev'ral parts neglects.
Do thou,
Lorenzo,
better taught,
Never indulge so wild a thought;
Conceiving th' individual man
No charge on nature's gen'ral plan.
What tho' impossible that we
At once the whole and parts should see;
To single objects here confin'd
Each fix'd attention of the mind;
Yet, shall we blasphemously join
Heav'n's intellect with yours and mine?
Know thou the world's great architect
Its smallest part shall not neglect;
As needful in the stately pile,
As golden roofs th' abutments vile;
Nor, in their kind, more perfect they,
The parian stones, than potter's clay.
How sadly, blund'ring in the dark,
Here
St. John
miss'd his boasted mark;
When, Heav'n's omnipotence t'enhance,
He almost gave the world to
chance:
Supposing God too great to mind
The peccadillos of mankind;
Too insignificant our claim
To deity's immediate aim.
Or rather, from his reasons given,
He thought the task too great for Heaven;
Too puzzling for th' eternal wit
To hold its state and thus submit;
Wherefore, like th'idiot at a loss
To count, Heav'n takes us in the gross.
Lorenzo,
probable the scheme,
However strange the doctrine seem,
Whate'er the next world give, in this
That virtue hath its share of blifs;
While all accounts 'tween vice and woe
Are settled and discharg'd below:
No ballance to receive or pay,
Left, shuffling, for a future day.
Go, make an estimate of life;
Compare the sums of joy and strife;
Each in its separate degree,
Duration and intensity.
Perhaps, upon the whole, you'll find
That neither's due to human-kind;
Nor loss nor profit in the trade
Of life's commercial pleasures made.
Mean-time how difficult to guess
At real objects of distress!
How difficult, in fact, to trace
Where real pleasure hath a place!
See, shudd'ring at September's frost,
In clothes of fur, Duke
Chilly
lost;
Lamenting, with his belly full,
The tinker's half-cloth'd, starving trull:
A jade, that, warmer than his grace,
Laughs at his pity to his face.
Accustom'd to the melting mood,
So, wishing ev'ry mortal good;
Behold
Tendrilla
drown her eyes
At what the sufferers despise.
How oft, the scene revers'd, again,
Apparent bliss is actual pain!
How oft we hear much-envied state
Groan beneath bulky grandeur's weight;
Of thousands broke their nightly rest
By that for which we call them blest!
Nay, as a God on earth ador'd,
See the dread inquisition's lord,
Rais'd, in the pomp of priestly pride,
How envied, by his monarch's side!
And yet how mis'rable a part
He acts, if not extinct his heart:
How little less, at nature's cost,
If ev'ry social feeling lost.
Mean-while the wretch, for whom we sigh,
In cruel tortures doom'd to die,
To pain superiour, fear or shame,
Exulting, smiles amidst the flame;
Makes his proud judge with malice swell;
And triumphs over death and hell.
Proportion'd to the
weight
of care,
Gives nature thus the pow'r to
bear?
But partial judges we, 'tis plain,
Of others' joy or others' pain.
So vice and virtue could we trace,
Neither is stampt upon the face.
And who to read presumes the art
The secret of another's heart?
Nay, ev'n that art how little known
To open, and peruse our own!
Who then, so much a slave to sense,
Shall here arraign Heav'n's providence:
Thinking "the good the world may leave
"Ere virtue's portion they receive;
"Triumphant that the wicked go,
"Blest, or unpunish'd, here below:
"As if our end a slight event,
"Depending on mere accident."
Is this not atheism in the eye
Of those who atheism most decry?
Who made the world, with equal skill
Can surely guide it, if he will.
Who, then, appearances shall trust,
To tnink that Heav'n's on earth unjust;
When vice and virtue may relate
Solely to man's sublunar state;
And here, for ought we truly know,
Be paid their dues of joy and woe.
Yet think not thou I here deny
That virtuous souls ascend the sky:
Or that the grov'ling sons of vice
Shall be excluded paradise.
Prepar'd, my friend, the man, in life,
By varied means of joy and strife,
Or, by redemption's wond'rous grace,
To view his Maker face to face,
In death compleated for the state
Design'd him by the will of fate,
A place of constant rest may find
The portion of the virtuous mind;
A place, comparatively ill,
For those whose god their brutal will:
By Heav'n th' immortal being plac'd,
Consistent with its pow'rs and taste.
Such future scenes may sure be given;
This call'd a
hell
and that a
heaven;
And justly vice and virtue, here,
Have
that
to hope and
this
to fear.
Still do I hear the growl of care?
"To be we know not what or where!"
Is it, because we know not why,
So sad a thing for once to die?
Is it so hazardous, my friend,
On God our maker to depend?
That God to whom we being owe,
Our friend and guardian here below;
Who, all along the vale of life,
In ev'ry scene of care and strife,
Affords his providential arm,
To raise beneath, or shield from, harm?
Is it for
him
so hard to save
Our conscious being from the grave?
Secure,
Lorenzo,
in the pow'r,
That wak'd me at my natal hour,
To me, and mine, in life so just,
On this in death I mean to trust:
Safe in the hollow of his hand,
Content to fall by whom I stand,
Of whom I kiss the chast'ning rod,
And bless the
father
in the
God.
EPISTLE THE
SEVENTH.
ARGUMENT.
On moral principles—The respective influence of
reason
and the
passions
—The immorality of
ignorance
and the indispensable duty of seeking
knowledge.
SUMMARY.
THE doctrine, by which virtue and vice are confessedly limited to this life, will doubtless excite the clamour of those who pride themselves, or ground their expectations of future happiness, on their own merit. It may also be ask'd, "To what purpose is it that mankind should pursue virtue rather than vice, if all our pains and pleasures depend reciprocally on each other, and our bad deeds neither actually offend, nor our good ones have any real merit with, the Deity." It is answer'd, that, as the merits and demerits of virtue and vice are partial and relative, so also must be conceiv'd their respective rewards and punishments. So that, whatever distinction may be made between the virtuous and vicious in a future state, it must be purely owing to the good pleasure of our creator, and not to the influence of our merit over his final determinations. —It must not be conceiv'd, however, that this doctrine countenances immorality. On the contrary, it proves, that (as we are led to vice solely by the motives of pleasure, apparently attending the gratification of our desires) were a conviction always present to the mind, that such pleasure must necessarily be attended with an equal degree of pain, such conviction might prove an antidote to vice, and preserve us, at least, in innocence; the motive to action being thereby remov'd. As to actual virtue, indecd, it is not pretended that any rational conviction whatever is, of itse'f, a sufficient motive to virtue: the use of reason being only to determine what is true or false, just or unjust; and not to excite us to embrace either. This is the business of the
passions;
which are, however, in themselves, neither good nor evil: those dispositions of mind which are generally term'd virtuous being the frequent occasion of our falling into vices, which opposite ones, tho' generally disapprov'd or detested, would have secur'd us from. Thus compassion, benevolence and candour are the fertile sources of vice; while hardness-of-heart, selfishness, and distrust are as frequently the means of preserving innocence. Nay the fierce, harden'd and turbulent passions enter sometimes into the most virtuous characters; and a heart unaffccted by the present suff'rings of humanity is, not unfrequently, necessary to preserve the rights and liberties of mankind. —In fact we are much deceiv'd, in the motives as well as in the practice of virtue; it being not only necessary that we should mean to do good and take the best way our reason may direct us to effect it; but that we should previously take those measures which are in our power, to acquire the knowledge of the means of doing such good. Wilful ignorance is declar'd therefore intentionally vicious; not having, tho' innocent in fact, the least claim to merit; to which ev'n virtue itself hath but relative pretensions. Indeed, as physical good in the consequence is the measure of moral good in the
action,
the very appearance of
merit
in the
agent
in a great degree vanistes; our power of doing good depending frequently on accident, and, not very seldom on downright knavery. On all which considerations knowledge is laid dow
as a fundamental and indispensible moral principle; and, hence, the employment of our leisure hours in inquiries after tru
is presum'd to be not merely entertaining but morally virtuous.
EPISTLE THE
SEVENTH.
HARK! my
Lorenzo,
how they rage,
The pious of our pious age;
Those who think Heav'n an easy fool,
Of wiser mortals made the tool,
Vile counters take for current coin;
Our filthy rags for robes divine:
We made its joint immortal heirs
For penance, paltry alms and prayers!
What racks their disappointed zeal
Dooms the poor, culprit bard to feel;
A thief, whose rhimes the rents have stole,
Long mark'd on their celestial roll!
So angry bees take sudden wing,
Furious the harmless boy to sting,
Who, less in anger than in play,
O'erturn'd their labours in his way.
Have they the poor their farthings lent,
At more than th' usual cent per cent;
Because the promises of Heav'n
For principal and interest given;
Yet, loth to mortgage house or land,
Dealing ev'n these with sparing hand;
Hard times and taxes wont to moan,
T'excuse their adding to the loan;
Spite of hypocrisy, confess'd
The
world's
security the best?
Vile us'rers! yet you think it hard,
Your virtue should not meet reward!
I think so too—hence, hence, to hell:
With merit there 'mong devils swell.
Do here th' immoral pertly ask,
What profits rise from virtue's task?
Or wherefore vice we should eschew,
If what the muse hath sung be true?
That "vice and virtue, bliss and woe
"Quit scores effectually below;
"While, unaffected, Heav'n surveys
"Its ends fulfill'd in human ways."
Say they "if pain give pleasure birth,
"To joy proportion'd grief, on earth,
"Our suff'rings all comparative,
"What matters how th' ungodly live?
"What can we gain by self-denial,
"Or standing virtue's fiery trial?"
Virtue's clear gain, my friend, 'tis true,
If any, hid from me and you,
Lodg'd in the dark decrees of fate,
A waits us in some future state;
A gift Heav'n pleases to bestow,
Wholly unmerited below.
So, whatsoever diff'rent state
Should vice in future life await,
Hid in the counsels of th' All-wise,
The reprobating secret lies:
Predestination's dreadful plan
Beyond the scrutiny of man.
Can yet
Lorenzo
weakly dream
That ours is an immoral scheme;
Because we hold that joy and strife
Are ballanc'd probably in life;
Whence equally nor blest nor curst
The lives of th' unjust and the just?
Shines not the sun alike, on earth,
On good and bad of mortal birth?
Falls not the plant-enliv'ning rain
Alike on mountain-heath and plain?
Tho' noxious there vile brambles shoot;
Here sweetest flow'rs and choicest fruit,
To reason's sober call, my friend,
Did the blind passions but attend;
While ever present to the mind
A full conviction we might find,
"That in the lust of mere desire
"No certain pleasure men acquire;
"But what in extasy they gain
"They're sure to lose in future pain."
By truth enlighten'd, hence, to fly
The distant evil as the nigh,
Men were no longer prone to vice,
Now stript of all her charms t'entice;
But, arming in their own defence,
Would stand in neutral innocence.
Through reason let a sensual eye
Th' enchanting form of vice espy:
Equivocal in make and face,
Her left side doth her right disgrace.
As form'd to give, and share, delight,
One blooming cheek doth hearts invite,
While roguish loves in ambush lie,
And dart their arrows from her eye.
A polish'd arm, a taper side,
Her thigh, that scarce her garments hide,
Her snow-white leg, and foot, shod neat,
The half of beauty's form compleat.
But ah, the contrast side appears
Worn out with care and gray with years;
With wrinkled brow and squinting eye,
Scowling most haggardly awry;
While hollow cheek and nostril maim'd,
Notch'd ear, burnt hand, and thigh-bone lam'd,
Display a wretch, from head to tail
Diseas'd with many a desp'rate ail;
A form, which, wrapt in squalid dress,
Compleats the half of ugliness.
Behold the charmer—this is
Vice.
Embrace her. —Is thy stomach nice?
Too often
passion,
single ey'd,
Enamour'd with the fairer side,
The monster clasps; till, turn'd her face,
We starting fly her loath'd embrace:
Through reason's medium only shown
Her real form, in tints her own;
Which thus disgusting to the sense,
Could ne'er beguile our innocence.
Should virtue, then, disown the muse;
At least let innocence excuse:
The strictest moralists content
If mortals were but innocent.
In actual virtue, true, indeed,
I see no hopes we should succeed;
If once by reason grown so tame
That naught our passions could inflame.
For say, desires may not extrude
A sense of moral rectitude:
This only points, to what is right;
But ne'er to virtue can excite.
Reason, indiff'rent to th' event,
Merely bestows its cold assent;
As far as truth's concern'd, in part,
Speaks to the head, but not the heart:
Reason bestow'd, an humble friend,
Not to keep faultless, but to mend;
With hopes to cheer or fears to bind
Self-love, a glutton deaf and blind;
To give our scene of action light;
To check the sensual appetite;
To show us what is good and fair;
And passion's blunders to repair.
To virtue sense of right and wrong
Must of necessity belong;
But from this knowledge who infer
The conscious party, cannot err?
Nay, founded on such sense our claim
To bear of vice the moral blame;
The fool, the mad, do what they will,
Standing excus'd of moral ill.
Say, then, the virtuous must be wise;
Yet not in wisdom virtue lies.
By other motives must the mind
To virtuous action be inclin'd.
"What other motive?" dost thou ask?
Lorenzo,
difficult the task
T'unravel here the human mind;
Its moral principles to find.
Sayst thou we all true virtue love;
And virtue that which all approve.
Supposing this, yet is't with you
That very approbation too?
Is this,
Lorenzo,
what is meant
By virtue sprung from
sentiment?
See
Hume,
on the general principles of morals.
By that ambiguous term of art
The native
goodness of the heart?
Pride not yourselves, ye
Pharisees,
That acts of kindness give you ease:
Nor think, ye
publicans,
from Heaven
An evil inclination given.
Know that from diff'rent passions vice
And virtue take not sep'rate rise.
For, tho' deducing moral ill
But from th' indulgence of the will,
No passion, not the love of pelf,
Is really vicious, in itself:
The noblest in the human breast,
Motives to action but confess'd,
Howe'er admir'd, howe'er approv'd,
From actual virtue far remov'd.
For a
good heart,
as put to use,
Or vice or virtue may produce:
A fertile soil, where, taking root,
Plants good and bad bear equal fruit.
Narcissa
boasted once a mind,
The purest sure of human kind,
Till growing passions taught her breast
To feel for all that seem'd distress'd,
To melt in tenderness of grief,
And sigh to give, unask'd, relief.
Ah, since, by cruel arts betray'd,
How low is fall'n the hapless maid!
Too innocent to feel distrust,
Or know how diff'rent love and lust!
Now, by her tempter ev'n accus'd,
See her abandon'd and abus'd;
Her open heart, her gen'rous mind
To prostitution how resign'd!
Of vices glorying in the shame
Her former self had blush'd to name.
Alas, for pity! sec, mean-while,
At lost
Narcissa
's ruin smile
Gremia,
to pity never mov'd,
As little loving as belov'd;
In spite of all
vile man
could say,
In pious maidenhood grown gray,
Blessing her better stars, that she
Still triumphs in her chastity;
Tho', with the planets, on her side
Ill-nature, ugliness and pride.
See
Phormio,
stoically cold,
In youth by constitution old,
Who never yet, his heart of stone,
Once made another's cause his own;
But, living for himself, or heirs,
Minds nothing but his own affairs:
Whose word not unbelieving Jews,
For more than Heav'n is worth, refuse:
His credit sacred, east and west
His bills negotiating best;
Safe in whose hands were many a pound;
Too good a man to run a-ground.
O worthy, honest man! we cry;
While bankrupt knaves in dungeons lie:
So vile the rogue, who, scorning pelf,
Lov'd others better than himself!
Thus oft th'inflexible, the just,
The man that never broke his trust,
Indebted to inhuman art,
Or killing coldness in his heart;
While base and mean the quick-of-sense,
From glowings of benevolence.
Lorenzo,
feelingly I speak
Of failings where myself am weak;
To whom adversity severe
Hath sold experience much too dear:
Hard hearted
prudence
far from me,
And narrow-soul'd
economy,
To knave and fool too oft a prey,
No match for either in his way,
Till cheated, plunder'd, fill'd with shame,
Lit on my luckless head the blame.
How short,
Lorenzo,
plainly, hence,
Of virtue is benevolence!
To mere
good nature,
while you live,
No more that pompous title give:
The milk of kindness in a trice
Yielding the luscious cream of vice.
The
milk of human kindness
hath been not unfrequently us'd, as a florid term, for benevolence. See
Fielding
and others.
The dryest eye, the hardest heart,
May act as virtuous a part:
When turn'd, as adders deaf, the ear
From all that others feel or fear;
Thence, vicious
sloth,
a whining cheat,
Is forc'd to work before it eat;
Misfortune,
struggling in its thrall,
Rises more glorious from its fall.
Should to the prodigal the friend,
On whom his spendthrift hopes depend,
When ask'd assistance or advice,
Reply, with looks as cold as ice,
With all the insolence of ease,
"Nay, friend, for me do what you please."
May this not teach the hand profuse
Virtuous discretion's sov'reign use;
And thus a coldness of the heart
A good to too much warmth impart?
How much less vicious oft the mind,
That ne'er, beneficent or kind,
For others broke one moment's rest,
Nor cheer'd with comfort the distress'd,
Than he, whose open hand and heart
Espouse the poor and needy's part,
Plunging in unforeseen distress
Hundreds, in striving one to bless.
Shortsighted, oft benevolence
Proves a sad breach of innocence:
To virtue requisite that first
The virtuous mind be strictly just.
Passions, the springs of joy and strife,
Are but the elements of life;
And, as the streams from mountains flow,
Smooth winding some through vales below,
While others, raging as they come,
Tear up their mother-mountain's womb;
Or, pouring down the hills amain,
Deluge, at once, the humble plain;
So some of these are gently mild,
While others, furious, bold and wild,
Foaming o'er reason's rock-built mounds,
Disdain the check of moral bounds.
But see in pastures streams of use
When art corrects the flood's abuse,
When, their due channels taught to keep,
In shallow brook or river deep,
Smiling through dappled meads they go;
And paint the flow'rs they cause to grow.
Corrected thus, by reason's art,
The bursts, or meltings, of the heart,
In
virtue
's channels see them glide;
Her flow'rs the blooming margin's pride.
Is the small spring thy fav'rite theme,
That trickles forth a shallow stream,
In murmurs soft, a purling rill?
What wilt thou do to drive the mill?
How wilt thou make to ride at large
Thy timber, or thy loaded barge?
As much as purling rills admir'd
The navigable stream requir'd;
The stream, whose turbulence abides
The roaring of the swelling tides,
Alike whose raging bosom swells,
And back the threat'ning tide repels.
The hero, thus, the hardy brave
It should seem that Mr.
Pope
suppos'd
heroism
incompatible with
virtue,
from the following lines, in his
essay on man.
Heroes are much the same, the point's agreed,
From
Macedonia
's madman to the
Swede;
The whole strange purpose of their lives, to find,
Or make, an enemy of all mankind.
I will grant that many heroick actions have been atchiev'd, which have given just room for those, who have no tincture of heroism in themselves, to suppose the hero to be without either head or heart. But, however reprehensible the conduct of heroes may have been in general, history may inform us that many of the distinguishing blessings mankind enjoy, have been effected by those, whom narrow-minded moralists have stigmatiz'd as rogues and madmen.
How needful half the world to save;
Like
Prussia
's king, through seas of blood
Wading, for threaten'd
Europe
's good!
Virtuously useful to mankind
The strongest as the weakest mind,
Thus, one no better than the other,
The warmest heart's the cold one's brother:
And neither this nor that, in fact,
Are virtuous till as such they act.
Yet here, appearances believ'd,
In virtuous actions oft deceiv'd,
How plain in th'hypocritick face
We read the characters of grace;
And falsely to youth's giddy tribe
Designing villainy ascribe;
While time, and circumstance, and place,
Our byass'd judgments here disgrace.
Is there a man, whose tender heart
Takes in another's pains a part,
Who clothes the naked, feeds the poor,
And bribes the orphan to his door;
So kind he cannot bear to see
Another less at ease than he?
Godlike benevolence! you cry;
And praise his
virtue
to the sky.
But were this virtuous mortal poor,
Oblig'd to beg from door to door;
Could he not eat the bread at rest,
Torn by the law from the distress'd;
Should his weak mind compunction feel,
In honest ways of trade, to
steal;
Could not the softness of his heart
Torture the horse, that draws the cart;
Mangle the lamb before it die,
Or draw its heart's blood through its eye:
Who would not cry, "too proud to serve!
"Work, idle wretch, or work or starve:"
To
Bridewell
's lash the knave consign'd,
For
vicious
tenderness of mind.
Is there who, worn with vice, begins
To hide his multitude of sins,
Leave of the wicked world doth take
And hermit turns for virtue's sake;
Or, anxious for the souls of men,
Flies to the pulpit or the pen?
Behold another
Paul!
we cry,
A new apostle from on high!
Are there whom cares nor want exclude,
At little cost, from doing good;
In pious practices that spend
Their fortune and their latter end;
The sick who physick in distress;
And make the trav'ler's burthen less?
To these what virtue will refuse
The praiseful, elegiack muse!
But, say, doth tenderness of heart
Teach the
divine's
or
doctor's
art?
Too oft unletter'd preachers rave,
And damn the souls they meant to save:
Too oft, alas, the pious pill
Of charity, like
Ward
's, doth kill:
While lighten'd more the
pedlar's
pack
To clothe our own than save his back.
"Whence then is virtue," dost thou cry?
In truth and nature, I reply:
Reason and passion both combin'd
To form true virtue in the mind.
Nor rests it there in mere design;
To go where these may chance t' incline.
'Tis not sufficient to set out,
Tho' meaning well, thy way in doubt;
Needful experience here to use,
That passion reason mayn't abuse;
Cautious in virtue's route to go
No farther than such route we know:
Lest, when, through ign'rance lost our way,
Passion to vice should wildly stray.
'Tis not enough to mean aright,
Unless that meant effect's in sight:
Too apt to wander from the mark,
When blund'ring forward in the dark.
A poor excuse to have it said
The heart had put it in the head,
When mischief done, instead of good,
For want of being understood!
To virtue pitiful our claim
When, at a venture taking aim,
More by good luck than sense or wit,
The mark of moral good we hit!
What virtue's in the madman's dream,
Or fool's impracticable scheme?
Whose, should they ev'n succeed, at best,
Chance-medley morals are confess'd.
Knowledge, my friend, goes, hence 'tis plain,
Foremost in virtue's splendid train;
While reason and the passions, join'd,
Walk closely, hand in hand, behind.
Is't said? "one mere good-natur'd deed
"All worth in science doth exceed."
One moral, or a mere well-natur'd deed,
Can all desert in sciences exceed.
Duke of Buckingham;
On this weak maxim dost object
We virtuous merit here neglect;
Thus honest ign'rance to contemn;
And inability condemn?
Sayst thou "
here
no fore-knowledge given,
Events are in the hands of Heaven;
"And, therefore, virtuous those confess'd
"From what they know who act the best."
Lorenzo,
no—unless 'tis shown
That such no better might have known.
'Tis true, as individuals here
Are plac'd in, each his, proper sphere,
Their knowledge more or less compleat
As genius and instruction meet,
Man by no seraph's rapture fir'd,
Virtue's, as knowledge giv'n, requir'd.
But think not thou that bounteous Heav'n
Hath barren understanding given;
Hath talents lent which, unapplied,
'Tis virtuous in the earth to hide.
No—with the pow'r of genius blest,
Improvement's claim'd, as interest.
Is there who turns away his ear,
Instruction's voice averse to hear,
Most obstinately bent to plod
Along the road his father trod,
Old custom never to forsake;
Nor use of eye or ear to make?
Tho' right the wilful wretch we find,
Is his a virtuous turn of mind?
With God above, or man below,
How is't deserving
not to know?
Of virtue's merit, folly, hush:
Nor put true wisdom to the blush,
Remember virtue still depends
Both on our motives and our ends.
What merit is't we gladly do
That which our hearts incline us to?
Or what that reason doth submit
To own the truth is right and fit?
For say that by the heart or head
Solely to virtue men were led.
If by the heart, and that alone,
What man e'er call'd his heart his own?
Right oft by impulse forc'd to go,
Whether his reason leads or no:
Apparently against the will,
As oft conducting him to ill.
How meritorious, then, the best
That love or pity warms the breast?
For this, nor that, from vice can save;
Or if they could—'tis God that gave.
Is it from caution, practis'd long,
You seek the right and shun the wrong;
By just experience understood
How much your int'rest to be good?
What merits here the clod of earth
That nature smil'd upon its birth;
And gave it reason's fost'ring aid
To teach it virtue as its trade?
Sayst thou "when head and heart we praise,
"Doth this not virtue's merit raise?
"The man of vicious acts asham'd—"
May yet for spiritual pride be blam'd.
"The elegantly just"—too nice
Perhaps for
vulgar
scenes of vice.
"The lowly-minded, kind and meek"—
Mean, pitiful, perhaps, and weak.
"The patriot, in his country's cause"—
A gudgeon, greedy of applause.
"The pious, that their God revere,"—
Only, perhaps, of Hell in fear;
Or, not by fears sufficient driven,
Push'd forward by the hopes of Heaven.
So little do we truly know
The cause to which we virtue owe;
To what bad principle or good
Ev'n we ourselves have vice withstood:
Nor can the best of mortals say
From what
has
yet directed
may;
Or in a state he never knew
Tell what his head and heart might do.
Who then their moral worth shall prize?
Shall ev'n the best the worst despise?
Thin the partitions that divide
Ev'n vice itself from virtue's pride;
The virtuous boaster weak and proud;
Like the tall ideot in the crowd,
Who, stalking with exalted tread,
Above his fellows rears his head:
While from his more distinguish'd height
The harm upon his pate doth light.
The pride of virtue hence depress'd,
O learn to pity not detest:
Ev'n looking with a brother's eye
On wretches doom'd by law to die:
To Heav'n that hath the diff'rence made
'Tween thee and them, the honour paid!
The object more of pity, sure,
The vicious mind no
leech
can cure,
Than such whose mere corporeal part
Diseas'd admits the doctor's art!
Nay, if by virtue understood
The act producing moral good,
And moral good and evil known
By sense of physical alone,
The term of merit thrown aside,
Abash'd at once is virtue's pride:
Since such most virtuous we must call
Who most promote the good of all.
Here virtue see, in fortune's power,
Dependent ev'ry day and hour!
So little rests on good intent,
So much alas, on accident!
See to the publick good conduce
Of wealth and state the simple use:
For—hence the poor are cloath'd, the hungry sed, Health to himself and to his infants bread The lab'rer bears.—
Pope.
Such pow'r of doing good a lot
By birth, caprice, or favour got:
A post of virtue oft the gain
Of knavery; honest hearts disdain.
Proportional to ev'ry state
Sayst thou its virtue we must rate;
Those much to blame, tho' doing good,
Who fail to do the must they could?
Most needful, then, how far to know
Our pow'rs of doing good may go:
In ev'ry station, place and time,
Neglectful ignorance a crime.
For say, if e'er preferr'd to place,
Should fortune take us into grace;
Tho' kings should act the donor's part,
They neither give a head or heart.
'Tis true a ribbon, star and garter
May make a flutt'ring fop look smarter;
SIR
John
sounds big and mighty pretty
Among the plain Johns of the city;
But
George
himself, of many a knight,
Ne'er dubb'd one sordid cit polite.
Clever indeed could royal grace
Fit ev'ry placeman for his place!
If being voted for with spirit
Supplied our want of real merit,
Conferr'd taste, judgment, observation,
Adapted to th'appointed station!
Title and pow'r give
consequence,
But ah! ne'er gave one jot of
sense.
Knowledge,
Lorenzo,
hence confese'd
Of moral principles the best,
Well spent we hope our vacant days
In studious search of wisdom's ways:
On reason while our steps attend,
Reason fair virtue's firmest friend!
Hail sober guide! O teach my youth
To woo thy lovelier sister
truth;
For whose embrace my vows I pay,
In ardent sighs, throughout the day;
Nor, when the longest day is o'er,
Cease, by the midnight lamp, to pore
O'er the dull tale, or tedious, page
Of saint or, more laborious, sage:
Happy if saint or sage could tell,
Where I with her might ever dwell:
With her for whom, and whom alone,
My genius for the verse be knwon:
For
truth
content to lose the
bays;
The
poet's
for her
lover's
praise.
EPISTLE THE
EIGHTH.
ARGUMENT.
On the immortality of the soul; and the arguments for, and against, a future state.
SUMMARY.
THE immortality of the soul, or doctrine of a future state, is propos'd as the subject of inquiry. A doctrine, which, however true or false in itself, is both weakly attack'd and lamely supported by the philosophical arguments generally made use of, for, or against, it. Comparisons drawn from the
vegetable
creation, however striking, are partial and prove nothing.
Moral
arguments prove as little, unless we could first be made certain that vice and virtue are not duly punish'd and rewarded in this life; or, unless we could entertain adequate ideas of divine justice. With these, the metaphysical refinements, concerning the soul's
immateriality,
are shown to be equally inconclusive. Our natural
desire of existence
is expos'd, also, as a weak argument for the justice of our claim to immortality. On the other hand, that
intimate connection
between body and mind, and their apparent dependance on each other, are shown to afford rather a specious plea in favour of the immortality of the soul, than, as frequently made to do, any argument against it—Setting, however, moral and metaphysical speculations aside, man is consider'd merely in the light of an
animal.
In which state of humiliation, his pretensions to a future state are, notwithstanding, evidently justified on the plain and reasonable supposition that, the Creator hath given to all animals such pow'rs and faculties as were necessary to the state of
being
appointed them.—Now the evident pursuits of other animals tend solely to the gratification' of themselves or the mere preservation of their kind. They have no intellectual system that extends beyond the life of the individual; nor doth their experience serve to the improvement of their species. With man it is otherwise: The preservation and gratification of the individual, however powerful their motives, are in him made subservient to more general views: his case, health and life being constantly sacrific'd to pursuits, that are of no use to him merely as an animal; but, on the contrary, serve to promote the intellectual perfection of his species; hence apparently intended for the enjoyment of a state of existence, to which those faculties are adapted. In the powers of imagination and genius may also be trac'd that faint image of the Deity, in which man was confessedly made. So that philosophy alone affords us sufficient reason to believe the certainty of a future state, without our having recourse to contested authorities, the chimerical suppositions of
errour,
or the absurdities of
ignorance.
EPISTLE THE
EIGHTH.
O Blind to truth, to science blind,
The sceptick tribe of human-kind!
Who doubt,
Lorenzo,
if our lot
Be here to die and be forgot,
Or if it prove our future fate
To know an intellectual state,
In death to perish, or to rise,
Immortal, to our native skies.
By our being immortal is only meant, that the soul doth not perish with the body; we being strangers to any philosophical proof of its abstract, or essential,
immortality.
Allur'd by wit to neither side,
Be reason our impartial guide;
Let us,
Lorenzo,
fairly weigh
What argument hath here to say.
Hast thou poor
Dromio
's sophisms got,
Who bids us vegetate and rot;
Man but a rank and useless weed?
Prove them alike and 'tis agreed.
But the analogy of
parts
Is all that's prov'd by skeptick arts.
Say that, "of vegetable race,
"We spread the root from place to place;
"The lovely flow'r of beauty blows;
"Twin sister to the province rose,
"Allures at morn the gazing eye,
"That ere the ev'ning sees it die."
Say, "years disrobe the mantled brow,
"As winter strips th' autumnal bough;
"The rough, rude blast to both unkind,
"Both perish by an eastern wind:
"Or, by the axe, untimely blow!
"Are laid their spreading honours low."
Admit,
Lorenzo,
this be true:
Go on—the parallel pursue.
Say, "the tall elms, you stately row,
"Sweet transports of sensation know.
"When zephyrs kiss the lilly's breast
"The lilly's rapture be confess'd."
Say "the broad oak, when thunders roar,
"Fears till the thunder-storm be o'er;
"Conscious of doubt and dread by turns,
"Stands trembling as the forest burns;
"Alive, awake, to nature's laws,
"From nature's scenes experience draws;
"Throbbing its trunk with hopes and fears,
"Grown old in wisdom as in years!
Is this absurd? absurd indeed!
Lorenzo
how unlike a weed!
To moral arguments dost run?
Here shall we end as we begun.
Sayst thou "the virtuous, when they die,
"In their own right ascend the sky;
"The wicked, here unpunish'd, go
"To torment in the world below;
"Heav'n's justice else we should arraign,
"And prove the virtuous good in vain,"
You take, my friend, for granted here,
What none by reason make appear;
That vice at God almighty's hands
Eternal punishment demands;
While endless bliss, beyond the skies,
Justice bestows, as virtue's
prize.
Justice!
Lorenzo,
what, my friend,
By
justice
dost thou here intend?
Her sword she holds; but, say, what ails
The equilibrium of her scales?
How low the one, tho' empty, lies,
To kick the beam while t'other flies!
Alas, I see by what compell'd;
In diff'rent mediums are they held;
One in
material
fluids buoy'd;
The other in a perfect
void:
Weigh'd in eternity and time,
The punishment against the crime!
Dare the self-righteous tribe to say,
That Heav'n's no more than virtue's pay,
While vice demerits endless woe?
Needs God a friend? fears God a foe?
Holding vindictive rage in store,
For his own sake, on man to pour?
O, no—unhurt th'Almighty cause,
Or kept or broken human laws.
Cease, then, presumption, to contend
That mortals Heav'n itself offend,
Or, at an
infinite
expence,
Must answer a
finite
offence:
To pay the fine immortal made;
Which else unable to have paid.
The dying wretch tho' tyrants cure
But tortures longer to endure;
With nature cruelty at strife
When criminals are quit with life;
Can God, whose tender mercies flow
O'er all his varied works below,
Whose loving kindness all confess,
Whose name the distant nations bless;
Say, can this God, of boundless love,
Vengeful as earthly tyrants prove?
O shame,
Lorenzo,
shame to all
Such cruelty that justice call!
Such argument, beside, is vain,
Unless the premises were plain;
Unless we first could make it clear,
That vice can ne'er be punish'd, here;
That virtue must be ever blest,
For foll'wing but its interest;
Or that we truly could define
That justice mortals call
divine.
By
metaphysicks
dost thou strive
To keep the man in death alive?
Wouldst thou, set moral pleas aside,
The body from the soul divide?
Material
that
and born to die,
While
this
a native of the sky;
Objects that none can hear and see
Hence claiming immortality!
But, say, is thy corporeal claim
Laid to the
matter
or the
frame?
Is it the
substance
of the heart
Or
make
that is the mortal part?
Doth change of form bring death alone?
Form
we must
immaterial
own.
If to the
essence
of the clay,
Again, mortality we lay,
Doom'd the loath'd carcass to the worm,
The
substance
changes but its
form:
Through modes of being giv'n to range,
Immortal in perpetual change,
Maiter
by all the skeptick crowd
Essentially the same allow'd;
In death, in life, our shame, our pride,
In various forms but modified.
Say, then, the
matter
or the
frame,
Or
both,
in
body
have a claim;
Nor mortal, nor immortal, we
From our
materiality.
This argument might be carried much farther, and the mere
potential
existence of matter prov'd, to a demonstration; but this would be perhaps, too abstruse to enter into poetical composition.
Lorenzo,
doth thy bosom beat
To claim in heaven th'immortal seat?
So fond of thy existence here,
Dost thou annihilation fear?
To fall as undistinguish'd clay
To dumb forgetfulness a prey?
The joys of paradise in view,
Sayst thou "thy claim must needs be true,
"Else, wherefore doth thy fond desire
"To immortality aspire,"
See the famous soliloquy in
Addison
's CATO; which may pass for logick on the
stage,
and is perhaps good-enough
theatrical
reasoning; but will hardly satisfy a philosopher, in his closet: unless, indeed, such a one as prefers the declamation of a
Plato
to the demonstrations of a
Newton.
Whate'er in
hope
be Heav'n's intent,
This is, my friend, no argument.
I, too, perhaps, so pleas'd to live,
My very means of life might give,
All I am worth, from death to save,
If hope were buried in the grave.
But let
Lorenzo
never trust
To wish or hope, however just:
Nor let a passionate desire
To reason's sober task aspire.
Wouldst thou false principles defend,
Because they serve a pleasing end?
Who loves the truth will sure despise
Her cause to rest on specious lies.
What merit doth it add to worth
That knaves its virtues babble forth?
What added weight or consequence,
In suff'rage, gives the fool to sense?
Again, is't said "so closely join'd
"In life the body and the mind,
"Reciprocally form'd to bear
"Each other's weight of pain and care,
"Sharing alike the mutual joy,
"Which either wholly may destroy;
"Since thus together both concur,
"We know not either to prefer,
"If both be purposely combin'd,
"In use of
body
or of
mind."
Are there who weakly, hence, suppose
"The soul no sep'rate being knows;
"But, as the body doth decay,
"So wears the mortal mind away."
Yet wherefore might not at our birth,
Lodg'd in this tenement of earth,
Lock'd up for life th'immortal mind,
Its temporary prison find,
Till paid our vital debt should be,
And death should set the captive free?
Mean-while, in hope, in fear, in doubt,
Concerning friends and foes without,
Prone through its prison grates to pry,
It sees Time's scatter'd ruins lie,
In darkness and confusion hurl'd,
The embryo of another world.
Why may not thus, on earth, be join'd
The body and the tenant mind?
Th'inhabitant, with cost and care,
Keeping his mansion in repair,
Us'd to the dungeon where he lies,
And prone his present home to prize,
Unknowing whither doom'd to roam,
If once bereft of house and home.
What wonder, then, for help he calls
When danger threats his tott'ring walls?
Nor strange, if, heedless of their fate,
They tumble on his wareless pate:
Each other's mutual strength and ward
The mansion and the mansion's lord.
What tho' we hold the soul to be
Attach'd to sensibility,
Concludes
Lorenzo
rashly hence
The soul's as mortal as the sense?
Alleging that "in life we find
"Perception to the organs join'd,
"Poor mortals of sensation void
"As these are damag'd or destroy'd;
"Therefore the soul on sense depends,
"And with the failing organ ends."
Lorenzo,
through a darken'd glass
Seest thou but faintly objects pass?
More darken'd yet, dost thou confess
Thy certainty of vision less?
With its transparency thy sight
Decreasing, till obstructed quite.
Suppose it broke or let it fall,
Dost think thou couldst not see at all?
Ridiculous! when objects lie
All open to the naked eye.
Thus, may the soul, to body join'd,
Be deaf, irrational or blind:
But take th'obstructing organs hence,
At liberty its native sense,
By fits no more it hears and sees,
As now by piece-meal and degrees,
In partial modes, adapted here
To organs of the eye and ear;
But, intellect, all ear, all eye,
It reads the wonders of the sky,
At once what nature can disclose
Of scientifick secrets knows:
Now sense and science both combin'd
In each perception of the mind.
But here,
Lorenzo,
for a while
Lay by the metaphysick foil.
With this, behind our darken'd glass,
Too apt to make a blund'ring pass:
By much more anxious, on the whole,
To guard the
body
than the
soul.
Too nice th' anatomizing art,
To take them dextrously apart,
Let us on both inquiry plan,
And scrutinize their compound,
man:
Contented from his present state
To reason of his future fate.
Doth
Dromio
say, to hold dispute,
"Man, if no plant, is yet a brute;
"A helpless animal in birth,
"His body form'd of kindred earth,
"An animal in his decay,
"His strength and vigour past away;
"Equal the beast's sagacious pow'rs
"Or ev'n superior oft to ours."
The politick, industrious bee
Dost own in wisdom rivals thee?
Oeconomy secures from want
The careful and laborious ant,
While man, with all his boasted sense,
Riots at health's and life's expence,
Luxurious, casts his cares aside,
Or starves through indolence or pride;
Here no preheminence his claim,
Insects! in life and death the same!
Is there no medium in dispute?
Must man be either God or brute?
Must we with burning seraphs join,
Or litter with the grov'ling swine?
Content to bear the slight disgrace
Of mingling with the brutal race;
Agreed—for once, no longer proud,
Be men mere animals allow'd.
Say that, more helpless at his birth
Than ev'n the vilest brute on earth,
Man, if denied the nurse's care,
Might have run wild, a human bear;
Have beat the plains in search of food,
Or sought his shelter in the wood:
Devoid of language and of art,
Apparent brute in head and heart.
Yet still,
Lorenzo,
as we find
Some little difference, in kind;
Man, as an animal, is known,
By marks peculiarly, his own.
Tho' both, sharp-sighted, grave and fat,
Melinda
and her tabby
cat,
But a specifick diff'rence seen
'Twixt
Pug
and
Faddle,
in the spleen,
The wild, the tame, the great, the small,
Included in one genus all;
We must not hence, my friend, infer
Melinda
's only born to purr;
Nor that, because alike in shape,
Faddle
by nature's but an
ape.
What, if a monkey, taught in
France,
A modish minuet could dance;
Or, mischievous, should play his tricks,
Vers'd in
Parisian
politicks,
Breaking thy china's brittle clay,
Tho' sure to suffer for his play.
Wouldst thou acknowledge, hence, to me,
The pert baboon,
un homme d'esprit?
Or own, on this sagacious plan,
A monkey's nat'rally a man?
Let rash polemicks idly prate
Of
nature
and a
nat'ral state,
The arts of social life despise,
And think that brutes are only wise;
Pretending better had it been
If kings and priests we ne'er had seen;
If lawless, ignorant and wild,
Man had been left, while yet a child,
With brutes to share a common fate;
More blest than in his present state:
Go thou, and act a social part
Man's nat'ral state's a state of art
The word
natural,
as
Mr. Hume
justly observes, is commonly taken in so many senses, that its signification remains very loose and indeterminate. The ingenious
Rousseau
of
Geneva,
after having declaimed heartily against
la bonne chere,
or, in plain English, displayed the terrible consequences of eating beef and pudding, cries out, Voilà les funestes garands que la plupart de nos maux sont notre propre ouvrage, et que nous les aurions presque tous évités, en conservant la maniére de vivre simple, uniforme, et solitaire qui nous étoit
prescrite
par la nature. Si elle nous a destinés a etre sains, j'ose presque assurer, que
l'etat de réflexion
est un
etat contre nature,
et que
l'homme qui medite
est un
animal dépravé.
What use is here made of the word
nature!
but I would ask, if mankind ever were in this state of solitude, how came it about they are united in a social one? —were they led to it by inclination or necessity? If by inclination, nature evidently prescribed it; if by the necessities peculiar to their species, a state of society was not only prescribed but enforced by nature. Indeed, whoever before doubted of man's being, by nature, a social animal!
.
'Twas
nature,
when the world was young,
Unloos'd our first, great grandsire's tongue;
Taught his wild sons the force of speech,
And gave the human pow'r to
teach;
To social converse tun'd the ear,
Gave mutual love and mutual fear,
Inspir'd the hero, warm'd the friend,
And bade the strong the weak defend.
'Twas
nature
gave
religion's
rule,
And bade the wise conduct the fool;
In justice gave the
law,
to save
The weak and honest from the knave.
'Twas
nature
rais'd our thoughts on high,
In contemplation, to the sky;
Taught us to beat the wilds of space,
And worlds on worlds in ether trace;
Planets and suns unknown explore,
And hence their maker, God, adore.
All this you
artificial
call,
I heed not empty terms at all.
Call it by whatsoever name,
'Tis
human nature
's special claim.
Say, from mere phrases to depart,
How differs nature here form art?
Within the solitary wood
Rears the old brock her helpless brood;
For safety, scouring to her den,
At sight, or sound of dogs and men?
'Tis nature warns her not t'expose
Herself, or offspring, to her foes;
But sends her to the safe retreat,
Where both enjoy their rest and meat.
Why rears not man in forest wild,
Or acorn grove, his fav'rite child?
But, lodg'd in towns, and nurs'd with care;
Protects and feeds his fondled heir.
Experter, sure, were human race
If train'd in forests for the chase;
The chase that might our food provide;
And what need
animals
beside?
Lorenzo,
here we plainly find
The characters that mark our
kind.
'Twas nature
knowledge
did impart,
Which time has ripen'd into
art:
But call it art, or what you will.
'Tis nature,
human nature
still.
As natural for us, my friend,
To bid the cloud-capt tow'rs ascend;
To bid the floating castles ride
On moving mountains of the tide;
As for the bird and beast their food
To seek in thicket, plain or wood,
To build the nest, or dig the den,
Far distant from the haunts of men.
Science,
disprove it those who can,
Is, therefore, natural to man:
To other animals denied
This best and worst excuse for pride.
There are, 'tis true, who gravely hold
"Grimalkin
's no essential scold,
"That men and monkies differ wide,
"As Gods to stocks and stones allied:"
Striving to prove, by various means,
"That brutes are nothing but
machines."
There are, indeed, also, some pretended philosophers, whose heads, so full of
impenetrable matter,
have been employ'd to prove MAN
a machine
too: but with these we will not dispute.
But, can we e'er with these suppose
Springs lodg'd within the
terrier
's nose,
Direct his nimble feet to go
Where the old
fox
lies earth'd below?
Or that by mere mechanicks
tray
Pursues his master's doubtful way?
For me, I frankly must impute
True syllogism to e'en the brute:
A pow'r of reason, spite of pride,
No more to them than man denied.
So much admitting, dost thou say?
"I fairly throw my cause away,
"Unless to brutes Heav'n also give
"In immortality to live."
Lorenzo,
no.—Tho' less refin'd,
My pleas are of another kind.
Low as the dust tho' here we lie,
Yet death may raise us to the sky.
Is man a
worm?
'tis
here
his fate
To winter his
aurelia
state;
In time to burst his cell design'd,
And leave his clay-cold case behind;
Flutt'ring on angel wings, to rise
A bright
papilio
of the skies!
Distinguish'd from the beasts, my friend,
Experience ev'ry doubt may end;
Granting "by nature all enjoy
"The pow'rs heav'n meant them to employ;
"Passion or instinct ne'er bestow'd
"On man, or beast, a useless load;
"But serving animals, in kind,
"To th' end for which they were design'd."
This once suppos'd, here end disputes.
Look round among our fellow brutes.
See to what point their labours tend;
And how in death their talents end.
Perfect the bird and beast, we find,
Advance not here their sev'ral kind;
From race to race no wiser grow,
No gradual perfection know;
T'increasing knowledge void their claim,
Still their specifick pow'rs the same,
In th'individual centred all,
Tho' generations rise and fall.
Mean-while, by observation wise,
The human genius never dies;
But, in tradition kept alive,
The wreck of kingdoms doth survive;
Or, glowing in th'instructive page,
Improving, lives from age to age;
Ev'n giving those who greatly
know
An immortality below.
What idle mourner droops his head?
Is
Plato, Locke,
or
Newton
dead?
With
Plato
still his pupils rove
Along his academick grove;
With
Locke
we wing the naked soul,
And mount with
Newton
to the pole.
To animals of ev'ry kind
Are, then, their proper pow'rs assign'd;
To actuate, strengthen or restrain,
Nor sense nor instinct giv'n in vain?
Man, as an animal confess'd,
Distinguish'd plainly from the rest,
Behold his pow'rs, his labours here
Presumptive of a brighter sphere!
Not merely to this life confin'd
The aim, and end, of human-kind!
Say, if our purpose but to live,
What mighty help doth science give?
What needed more the human brute
Than cooling springs and strength'ning fruit?
Or, summer past, the diet spare
Of wholesome roots, his winter fare?
How need our better rest and health
Golconda
's or
Potosi
's wealth,
That sacrific'd that health and rest,
To fetch it home from east and west?
Lorenzo,
sure, if human-kind
For this life only were design'd,
As well we ignorant had been
Of luxury, the bawd to sin;
As well those arts had been without
That give, while none can cure, the gout.
Ah! why was speculation given
If not to teach the way to Heav'n?
What need have animals below
The planets' paths above to know?
Or in what curves, meand'ring, rove
Satellites
round the orb of
Jove?
Lends art its microscopick eye,
In nature's miniature to pry?
To see beneath the civil knife
The butcher'd atoms robb'd of life;
To know that 'scaping from the steel,
Thousands may perish at a meal:
While, conscious ev'ry step we tread,
We trample hosts of beings dead.
Ah, why this knowledge giv'n, to raise
Our wonder to our Maker's praise;
Why hence inspir'd our God t'adore,
If seen, in death, his face no more?
It cannot be.—Of Heav'nly birth,
Science, no offspring of the earth,
To man hath
Jacob
's ladder giv'n,
Reaching, its foot on earth, to heav'n.
O, seize, with ardour seize the prize;
And claim thy kindred to the skies.
Genius,
Lorenzo,
yours or mine,
Faint image of the pow'r divine;
Endow'd with ev'n
creative
pow'r,
To form the beings of an hour,
To people worlds, to light the skies,
To bid a new creation rise;
O'er all to wield the thund'rer's rod,
And act the momentary God!
Ev'n here my friend, in nature's plan
Own'd the
divinity
of MAN.
A truth that genius feels and knows,
As oft as with the God it glows.
And shall t'oblivion be consign'd
This portion of etherial mind?
O, no.—Come death in any form,
I doubt not to ride out the storm;
The shipwreck'd body to survive;
My thinking part still left alive.
Mean-while, through all the modes of sense,
Bear me, bold
Contemplation,
hence.
On thy firm wing, O, let me soar;
And idly hope and fear no more.
Bear me to th' ever-blooming groves,
Where genius with fair science roves;
Where, in the cool sequester'd shade,
Sits
Resignation,
pious maid;
To Heav'n directed by whose eye,
When drooping nature calls to die,
Let
this
my latest
wishes
crown,
On her soft lap to lay me down;
Whilst mild
content,
and gentle
peace,
Her handmaids, waiting my release,
Strow, stealing round with softest tread,
Their grateful roses o'er my bed,
No thorn among, to break my rest;
By euthanasian slumbers blest;
Without a sigh, at close of day,
To breathe, becalm'd, my soul away.