DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Treasure 'Room mm tfTMaxiMTm xt here. Ave r>t/yf- cu/. cm urnom. isou (ook ; n J 4a.crtle.jo0K, *nnst e/ch&d *Ac man j4> u>a/cA/nent % a/ none O-yacu itc She UvoA rrriaht 'urirt. Jne uroruCnouta oook* enouoA/craui froua/uy Aancluru* Snia Oeware/, d znt/ The iron rod of penury still compels Her wretched slave to bow the knee to wealth, And poison, with unprofitable toil, A life too void of solace to confirm The very chains that bind him to his doom. Nature, impartial in munificence, Has gifted man with all-subduing will. Matter, with all its transitory shapes, Lies subjected and plastic at his feet, That, weak from bondage, tremble as they tread. How many a rustic Milton has past by, Stifling the speechless longings of his heart, In unremitting drudgery and care ! How many a vulgar Cato has compelled His energies, no longer tameless then, To mould a pin, or fabricate a nail ! How many a Newton, to whose passive ken Those mighty spheres that gem infinity Were only specks of tinsel, fixed in heaven To light the midnights of his native town ! Yet every heart contains perfection's germ : The wisest of the sages of the earth, That ever from the stores of reason drew Science and truth, and virtue's dreadless tone, Were but a weak and inexperienced boy, Proud, sensual, unimpassioned, unimbued With pure desire and universal love, Compared to that high being, of cloudless brain, Untainted passion, elevated will, Which death (who even would linger long in awe Within his noble presence, and beneath His changeless eyebeam,) might alone subdue. Him, every slave now dragging through the filth Of some corrupted city his sad life, Pining with famine, swoln with luxury, Blunting the keenness of his spiritual sense With narrow schemings and unworthy cares, Or madly rushing through all violent crime, V.] QUEEN MAB. To move the deep stagnation of his soul, — Might imitate and equal. But mean lust Has bound its chains so tight around the earth, That all within it but the virtuous man Is venal : gold or fame will surely reach The price prefixed by selfishness, to all But him of resolute and unchanging will ; Whom, nor the plaudits of a servile crowd, Nor the vile joys of tainting luxury, Can bribe to yield his elevated soul To tyranny or falsehood, though they wield With blood-red hand the sceptre of the world. All things are sold : the very light of heaven Is venal ; earth's unsparing gifts of love. The smallest and most despicable things That lurk in the abysses of the deep, All objects of our life,— even life itself, And the poor pittance which the laws allow Of liberty, — the fellowship of man, Those duties which his heart of human love Should urge him to perform instinctively, Are bought and sold as in a public mart Of undisguising selfishness, that sets On each its price, the stamp-mark of her reign. Even love is sold : the solace of all woe Is turned to deadliest agony : — old age Shivers in selfish beauty's loathing arms, And youth's corrupted impulses prepare A life of horror from the blighting bane Of commerce ; whilst the pestilence that springs From unenjoying sensualism, has filled All human life with hydra-headed woes. Falsehood demands but gold to pay the pangs Of outraged conscience ; for the slavish priest Sets no great value on his hireling faith : A little passing pomp, some servile souls, Whom cowardice itself might safely chain, Or the spare mite of avarice could bribe To deck the triumph of their languid zeal, Can make him minister to tyranny. More daring crime requires a loftier meed : 40 QUEEN MAB. [V. Without a shudder, the slave-soldier lends His arms to murderous deeds, and steels his heart, When the dread eloquence of dying men, Low mingling on the lonely field of fame, Assails that nature, whose applause he sells For the gross blessings of a patriot mob, For the vile gratitude of heartless kings, And for a cold world's good word,-— viler still ! There is a nobler glory, which survives Until our being fades, and, solacing All human care, accompanies its change ; Deserts not virtue in the dungeon's gloom, And, in the precincts of the palace, guides Her footsteps through that labyrinth of crime ; Imbues her lineaments with dauntlessness, Even when, from power's avenging hand, she takes Her sweetest, last, and noblest title — death ! — The consciousness of good, which neither gold, Nor sordid fame, nor hope of heavenly bliss, Can purchase ; but a life of resolute good, Unalterable will, quenchless desire Of universal happiness, the heart That beats with it in unison, the brain, Whose ever wakeful wisdom toils to change Reason's rich stores for its eternal weal. This commerce of sincerest virtue needs No mediative signs of selfishness, — No jealous intercourse of wretched gain, — No balancings of prudence, cold and long ; In just and equal measure all is weighed, One scale contains the sum of human weal, And one, the good man's heart. How vainly seek The selfish for that happiness denied To aught but virtue ! Blind and hardened, they, Who hope for peace amid the storms of care, Who covet power they know not how to use, And sigh for pleasure they refuse to give, — Madly they frustrate still their own designs ; And, where they hope that quiet to enjoy Which virtue pictures, bitterness of soul, VI.] QUEEN MAB. 41 Pining regrets, and vain repentances, Disease, disgust, and lassitude, pervade Their valueless and miserable lives. But hoary-headed selfishness has felt Its death-blow, and is tottering to the grave : A brighter morn awaits the human day, When every transfer of earth's natural gifts Shall be a commerce of good words and works ; When poverty and wealth, the thirst of fame. The fear of infamy, disease, and woe, War with its million horrors, and fierce hell Shall live but in the memory of time, Who, like a penitent libertine, shall start, Look back, and shudder at his younger years. VI. all ear, The Spirit felt the Fairy's burning speech. O'er the thin texture of its frame, The varying periods painted changing glows, As on a summer even, When soul-enfolding music floats around, The stainless mirror of the lake Re-images the eastern gloom, Mingling convulsively its purple hues With sunset's burnished gold. Then thus the Spirit spoke : It is a wild and miserable world ! Thorny, and full of care, Which every fiend can make his prey at will. Fairy ! in the lapse of years, Is there no hope in store ? Will yon vast suns roll on Interminably, still illumining The night of so many wretched souls, And see no hope for them ? Will not the universal Spirit e'er Revivify this withered limb of Heaven ? 42 QUEEN MAB. (VI. The Fairy calmly smiled In comfort, and a kindling gleam of hope Suffused the Spirit's lineaments. Oh ! rest thee tranquil : chase those fearful doubts, Which ne'er could rack an everlasting soul, That sees tke chains which bind it to its doom. Yes ! crime and misery are in yonder earth. Falsehood, mistake, and lust ; But the eternal world Contains at once the evil and the cure. Some eminent in virtue shall start up, Even in perversest time : The truths of their pure lips, that never die, Shall bind the scorpion falsehood with a wreath Of ever-living flame, Until the monster sting itself to death. How sweet a scene will earth become ! Of purest spirits, a pure dwelling-place, Symphonious with the planetary spheres, "When man, with changeless nature coalescing, Will undertake regeneration's work, When its ungenial poles no longer point To the red and baleful sun That faintly twinkles there. Spirit ! on yonder earth, Falsehood now triumphs ; deadly power Has fixed its seal upon the lip of truth ! Madness and misery are there ! The happiest is most wretched ! yet confide, Until pure health-drops from the cup of joy, Fall like a dew of balm upon the world. Now, to the scene I show, in silence turn, And read the blood-stained charter of all woe, Which nature soon, with re-creating hand, Will blot in mercy from the book of earth. How bold the flight of passion's wandering wing, How swift the step of reason's firmer tread, How calm and sweet the victories of life, How terrorless the triumph of the grave ! How powerless were the mightiest monarch's arm Vain his loud threat, and impotent his frown ! How ludicrous the priest's dogmatic roar ! The weight of his exterminating curse, How light ! and his affected charity. VI-3 QUEEN MAB. 43 To suit the pressure of the changing times. What palpable deceit ! — but for thy aid, Religion ! but for thee, prolific fiend, Who peoplest earth with demons, hell with men, And heaven with slaves ! Thou taintest all thou lookest upon ! the stars, Which on thy cradle beamed so brightly sweet. Were gods to the distempered playfulness Of thy untutored infancy ; the trees, The grass, the clouds, the mountains, and the sea, All living things that walk, swim, creep, or fly, W T ere gods ; the sun had homage, and the moon Her worshipper. Then thou becamest a boy, More daring in thy frenzies : every shape, Monstrous or vast, or beautifully wild, Which, from sensation's relics, fancy culls ; The spirits of the air, the shuddering ghost, The genii of the elements, the powers That give a shape to nature's varied works, Had life and faith in the corrupt belief Of thy blind heart : yet still thy youthful hands Were pure of human blood. Then manhood gave Its strength and ardour to thy frenzied brain : Thine eager gaze scanned the stupendous scene, Whose wonders mocked the knowledge of thy pride : Their everlasting and unchanging laws Reproached thine ignorance. Awhile thou stoodst Baffled and gloomy; then thou didst sum up The elements of all that thou didst know ; The changing seasons, winter's leafless reign. The budding of the heaven-breathing trees, The eternal orbs that beautify the night, The sun-rise, and the setting of the moon, Earthquakes and wars, and poisons and disease, And all their causes, to an abstract point, Converging, thou didst bend, and called it — God ! The self-sufficing, the omnipotent, The merciful, and the avenging God ! Who, prototype of human misrule, sits High in heaven's realm, upon a golden throne, Even like an earthly king : and whose dread work, Hell gapes for ever for the unhappy slaves Of fate, whom he created, in his sport, 44 QUEEN MAB. [VI. To triumph in their torments when they fell ! Earth heard the name ; earth trembled, as the smoke Of his revenge ascended up to heaven, Blotting the constellations ; and the cries Of millions, butchered in sweet confidence And unsuspecting peace, even when the bonds Of safety were confirmed by wordy oaths Sworn in his dreadful name, rung through the land ; Whilst innocent babes writhed on thy stubborn spear ; And thou didst laugh to hear the mother's shriek Of maniac gladness, as the sacred steel Felt cold in her torn entrails ! Religion ! thou wert then in manhood's prime : But age crept on ; one God would not suffice For senile puerility; thou framedst A tale to suit thy dotage, and to glut Thy misery-thirsting soul, that the mad fiend Thy wickedness had pictured, might afford A plea for sating the unnatural thirst For murder, rapine, violence, and crime, That still consumed thy being, even when Thou heardest the step of fate ! that flames might light Thy funeral scene, and the shrill horrent shrieks Of parents dying on the pile that burned To light their children to thy paths, the roar Of the encircling flames, the exulting cries Of thine apostles, loud commingling there, Might sate thine hungry ear Even on the bed of death ! But now contempt is mocking thy grey hairs j Thou art descending to the darksome grave, Unhonoured and unpitied, but by those Whose pride is passing by like thine, and sheds, Like thine, a glare that fades before the sun Of truth, and shines but in the dreadful night That long has lowered above the ruined world. Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light, Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffused A spirit of activity and life, That knows no term, cessation, or decay ; That fades not when the lamp of earthly life, VI.J QUEEN MAB. Extinguished in the dampness of the grave, Awhile there slumbers, more than when the babe In the dim newness of its being feels The impulses of sublunary things, And all is wonder to unpractised sense : But, active, stedfast, and eternal, still Guides the fierce whirlwind, in the tempest roars, Cheers in the day, breathes in the balmy groves, Strengthens in health, and poisons in disease ; And in the storm of change, that ceaselessly Rolls round the eternal universe, and shakes Its undecaying battlement, presides, Apportioning with irresistible law The place each spring of its machine shall fill ; So that when waves on waves tumultuous heap Confusion to the clouds, and fiercely driven Heaven's lightnings scorch the uprooted ocean-fords. Whilst, to the eye of shipwrecked mariner, Lone sitting on the bare and shuddering rock, All seems unlinked contingency and chance : No atom of this turbulence fulfils A vague and unnecessitated task, Or acts but as it must and ought to act. Even the minutest molecule of light, That in an April sun-beam's fleeting glows, Fulfils its destined, though invisible work, The universal Spirit guides ; nor less, When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, Has led two hosts of dupes to battle-field, That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves. And call the sad work — glory, does it rule All passions : not a thought, a will, an act, No working of the tyrant's moody mind, Nor one misgiving of the slaves who boast Their servitude, to hide the shame they feel, Nor the events enchaining every will, That from the depths of unrecorded time Have drawn all-influencing virtue, pass Unrecognized, or unforeseen by thee, Soul of the Universe ! eternal spring Of life and death, of happiness and woe, Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene That floats before our eyes in wavering light Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison, 45 46 QUEEN MAB. [vi. Whose chains and massy walls We feel, but cannot see. Spirit of Nature ! all-sufficing power, Necessity ! thou mother of the world ! Unlike the God of human error, thou Requirest no prayers or praises ; the caprice Of man's weak will belongs no more to thee Than do the changeful passions of his breast To thy unvarying harmony : the slave, Whose horrible lusts spread misery o'er the world, And the good man, who lifts, with virtuous pride, His being, in the sight of happiness, That springs from his own works ; the poison-tree, Beneath whose shade all life is withered up, And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords A temple where the vows of happy love Are registered, are equal in thy sight : No love, no hate, thou cherishest ; revenge And favouritism, and worst desire of fame Thou knowest not ; all that the wide world contains Are but thy passive instruments, and thou Regardest them all with an impartial eye, Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel, Because thou hast not human sense, Because thou art not human mind. Yes ; when the sweeping storm of time Has sung its death-dirge o'er the ruined fanes And broken altars of the almighty fiend, Whose name usurps thy honours, and the blood Through centuries clotted there, has floated down The tainted flood of ages, shalt thou live Unchangeable ! A shrine is raised to thee, Which, nor the tempest-breath of time, Nor the interminable flood, Over earth's slight pageant rolling, Availeth to destroy,— The sensitive extension of the world, That wondrous and eternal fane, Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join, To do the will of strong necessity, And life, in multitudinous shapes, Still pressing forward where no term can be, Like hungry and unresting flame Curls round the eternal columns of its strength. VII.] QUEEN MAB. 47 VII. SPIRIT. I was an infant when my mother went To see an atheist burned. She took me there ; The dark-robed priests were met around the pile j The multitude was gazing silently : And as the culprit passed with dauntless mein, Tempered disdain, in his un altering eye, Mixed with a quiet smile, shone calmly forth : The thirsty fire crept round his manly limbs : His resolute eyes were scorched to blindness soon; His death-pang rent my heart ! the insensate mob Uttered a cry of triumph, and I wept. Weep not, child ! cried my mother, for that man FAIRY. There is no God ! Nature confirms the faith his death-groan sealed: Let heaven and earth, let man's'revolving race, His ceaseless generations tell their tale; Let every part depending on the chain That links it to the whole, point to the hand That grasps its term ! let every seed that falls In silent eloquence unfold its store Of argument ; infinity within, Infinity without, belie creation ; The exterminable spirit it contains Is nature's only God ; but human pride Is skilful to invent most serious names To hide its ignorance. The name of God Has fenced about all crime with holiness, Himself the creature of his worshippers, Whose names, and attributes, and passions change, Seeva, Buddh, Foh, Jehovah, God, or Lord, Even with the human dupes who build his shrines, Still serving o'er the war-polluted world For desolation's watch-word ; whether hosts Stain his death-blushing chariot-wheels, as on 48 QUEEN MAB. [VII. Triumphantly they roll, whilst Brahmins raise A sacred hymn to mingle with the groans ; Or countless partners of his power divide His tyranny to weakness ; or the smoke Of burning towns, the cries of female helplessness, Unarmed old age, and youth, and infancy, Horribly massacred, ascend to heaven In honour of his name ; or, last and worst. Earth groans beneath religion's iron age, And priests dare babble of a God of peace, Even whilst their hands are red with guiltless blood, Murdering the while, uprooting every germ Of truth, exterminating, spoiling all, Making the earth a slaughter-house ! O Spirit ! through the sense By which thy inner nature was apprised Of outward shews, vague dreams have rolled, And varied reminiscences have waked Tablets that never fade ; All things have been imprinted there, The stars, the sea, the earth, the sky, Even the unshapeless lineaments Of wild and fleeting visions Have left a record there To testify of earth. These are my empire, for to me is given The wonders of the human world to keep, And fancy's thin creations to endow With manner, being, and reality ; Therefore a wondrous phantom, from the dreams Of human error's dense and purblind faith, I will evoke, to meet thy questioning. Ahasuerus, rise ! A strange and woe-worn wight Arose beside the battlement, And stood unmoving there. His inessential figure cast no shade Upon the golden floor ; His port and mien bore mark of many years, And chronicles of untold ancientness "Were legible within his beamless eye : VII.] QUEEN MAB. 49 Yet his cheek bore the mark of youth : Freshness and vigour knit his manly frame ; The wisdom of old age was mingled there With youth's primaeval dauntlessness ; And inexpressible woe, Chastened by fearless resignation, gave An awful grace to his all- speaking brow. SPIRIT. Is there a God ? AHASUERUS. Is there a God? — aye, an almighty God, And vengeful as almighty ! Once his voice Was heard on earth; earth shuddered at the sound; The fiery-visaged firmament expressed Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawned To swallow all the dauntless and the good That dared to hurl defiance at his throne, Girt as it was with power. None but slaves Survived, — cold-blooded slaves, who did the work Of tyrannous omnipotence ; whose souls No honest indignation ever urged To elevated daring, to one deed Which gross and sensual self did not pollute. These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend. Gorgeous and vast : the costly altars smoked With human blood, and hideous paeans rung Through all the long-drawn aisles. A murderer heard His voice in Egypt, one whose gifts and arts Had raised him to his eminence in power, Accomplice of omnipotence in crime, And confident of the all-knowing one. These were Jehovah's words. From an eternity of idleness I, God, awoke ; in seven days' toil made earth From nothing ; rested, and created man : I placed him in a paradise, and there Planted the tree of evil, so that he Might eat and perish, and my soul procure Wherewith to sate its malice, and to turn, Even like a heartless conqueror of the earth, All misery to my fame. The race of men 5 60 QUEEN MAB. [VII. Chosen to my honour, with impunity May sate the lusts I planted in their heart. Here I command thee hence to lead them on, Until, with hardened feet, their conquering troops Wade on the promised soil through woman's blood, And make my name be dreaded through the land. Yet ever-burning flame and ceaseless woe Shall be the doom of their eternal souls, With every soul on this ungrateful earth, Virtuous or vicious, weak or strong, — even all Shall perish to fulfil the blind revenge (Which you, to men, call justice) of their God. The murderer's brow Quivered with horror. God omnipotent, Is there no mercy? must our punishment Be endless ? will long ages roll away, And see no term ? Oh, wherefore hast thou made In mockery and wrath this evil earth 1 Mercy becomes the powerful — be but just : God ! repent and save. Oneway remains: 1 will beget a son, and he shall bear The sins of all the world : he shall arise In an unnoticed corner of the earth, And there shall die upon a cross, and purge The universal crime ; so that the few On whom my grace descends, those who are marked As vessels to the honour of their God, May credit this strange sacrifice, and save Their souls alive : millions shall live and die, Who ne'er shall call upon their Saviour's name, But, unredeemed, go to the gaping grave. Thousands shall deem it an old woman's tale, Such as the nurses frighten babes withal: These, in a gulf of anguish and of flame, Shall curse their reprobation endlessly, Yet tenfold pangs shall force them to avow, Even on their beds of torment, where they howl, My honour and the justice of their doom. What then avail their virtuous deeds, their thoughts VII.J QUEEN MAB. 51 Of purity, with radiant genius bright, Or lit with human reason's earthly ray? Many are called, but few will I elect. Do thou my bidding, Moses ! Even the murderer's cheek Was blanched with horror, and his quivering lips Scarce faintly uttered — O almighty one, I tremble and obey ! Spirit ! centuries have set their seal On this heart of many wounds, and loaded brain, Since the incarnate came : humbly he came, Veiling his horrible Godhead in the shape Of man, scorned by the world, his name unheard, Save by the rabble of his native town, Even as a parish demagogue. He led The crowd; he taught them justice, truth, and peace In semblance ; but he lit within their souls The quenchless flames of zeal, and blest the sword He brought on earth to satiate with the blood Of truth and freedom his malignant soul. At length his mortal frame was led to death. 1 stood beside him : on the torturing cross No pain assailed his unterrestrial sense ; And yet he groaned. Indignantly I summed The massacres and miseries which his name Had sanctioned in my country, and I cried, Go ! go ! in mockery. A smile of godlike malice re-illumined His fading lineaments. — I go, he cried, But thou shalt wander o'er the unquiet earth Eternally. The dampness of the grave Bathed my imperishable front. I fell, And long lay tranced upon the charmed soil. When I awoke, hell burned within my brain, Which staggered on its seat ; for all around The mouldering relics of my kindred lay, Even as the Almighty's ire arrested them, And in their various attitudes of death My murdered children's mute and eyeless sculls Glared ghastily upon me. I QUEEN MAB. [vil. But my soul, From sight and sense of the polluting woe Of tyranny, had long learned to prefer Hell's freedom to the servitude of heaven. Therefore I rose, and dauntlessly began My lonely and unending pilgrimage, Resolved to wage unweariable war With my almighty tyrant, and to hurl Defiance at his impotence to harm Beyond the curse I bore. The very hand That barred my passage to the peaceful grave Has crushed the earth to misery, and given Its empire to the chosen of his slaves. These have I seen, even from the earliest dawn Of weak, unstable, and precarious power; Then preaching peace, as now they practise war, So, when they turned but from the massacre Of unoffending infidels, to quench Their thirst for ruin in the very blood That flowed in their own veins, and pitiless zeal Froze every human feeling, as the wife. Sheathed in her husband's heart the sacred steel, Even whilst its hopes were dreaming of her love ; And friends to friends, brothers to brothers stood Opposed in bloodiest battle-field, and war, Scarce satiable by fate's last death-draught waged, Drunk from the wine-press of the Almighty's wrath ; Whilst the red cross, in mockery of peace, Pointed to victory ! When the fray was done, No remnant of the exterminated faith Survived to tell its ruin, but the flesh, With putrid smoke poisoning the atmosphere, That rotted on the half extinguished pile. Yes ! I have seen God's worshippers unsheathe The sword of his revenge, when grace descended, Confirming all unnatural impulses, To sanctify their desolating deeds ; And frantic priests waved the ill-omened cross O'er the unhappy earth : then shone the Sun On showers of gore from the upflashing steel Of safe assassination, and all crime Made stingless by the spirits of the Lord, And blood-red rainbows canopied the land. VII.J QUEEN MAB. 53 Spirit ! no year of my eventful being Has passed unstained by crime and misery, [slaves Which flows from God's own faith. I've marked his With tongues whose lies are venomous, beguile The insensate mob, and whilst one hand was red With murder, feign to stretch the other out For brotherhood and peace ; and that they now Babble of love and mercy, whilst their deeds Are marked with all the narrowness and crime That freedom's young arm dare not yet chastise; Reason may claim our gratitude, who now Establishing the imperishable throne Of truth, and stubborn virtue, maketh vain The unprevailing malice of my foe, Whose bootless rage heaps torments for the brave, Adds impotent eternities to pain, Whilst keenest disappointment racks his breast To see the smiles of peace around them play, To frustrate, or to sanctify their doom. Thus have I stood, — through a wild waste of years Struggling with whirlwinds of mad agony, Yet peaceful, and serene, and self-enshrined, Mocking my powerless tyrant's horrible curse With stubborn and unalterable will, Even as a giant oak, which heaven's fierce flame Had scathed in the wilderness, to stand A monument of fadeless ruin there ; Yet peacefully and movelessly it braves The midnight conflict of the wintry storm, As in the sun-light's calm it spreads Its worn and withered arms on high To meet the quiet of a summer's noon. The Fairy waved her wand : Ahasuems fled Fast as the shapes of mingled shade and mist, That lurk in the glens of a twilight grove, Flee from the morning beam : The matter of which dreams are made Not more endowed with actual life Than this phantasmal portraiture Of wandering human thought. 5* «'* • 54 QUEEN MAB. L vnI * VIII. The present and the past thou hast beheld : It was a desolate sight. Now, Spirit, learn The secrets of the future. — Time ! Unfold the brooding pinion of thy gloom, Render thou up thy half-devoured babes. And from the cradles of eternity, Where millions lie lulled to their portioned sleep By the deep murmuring stream of passing things, Tear thou that gloomy shroud. — Spirit, behold Thy glorious destiny ! Joy to the Spirit came. Through the wide rent in Time's eternal veil, Hope was seen beaming through the mists of fear; Earth was no longer hell ; Love, freedom, health, had given Their ripeness to the manhood of its prime, And all its pulses beat Symphonious to the planetary spheres : Then dulcet music swelled Concordant with the life-strings of the soul : It throbbed in sweet and languid beatings there, Catching new life from transitory death, — Like the vague sighings of a wind at even, That wakes the wavelets of the slumbering sea And dies on the creation of its breath, 'And sinks and rises, fails and swells by fits : Was the pure stream of feeling That sprung from these sweet notes, And o'er the Spirit's human sympathies With mild and gentle motion calmly flowed. Joy to the Spirit came, — Such joy as when a lover sees The chosen of his soul in happiness, And witnesses her peace Whose woe to him were bitterer than death, Sees her unfaded cheek Glow mantling in first luxury of health, Thrills with her lovely eyes, Which like two stars amid the heaving main Sparkle through liquid bliss. VIII.] QUEEN MAB. 55 Then in her triumph spoke the Fairy Queen : I will not call the ghost of ages gone To unfold the frightful secrets of its lore • The present now is past, And those events that desolate the earth Have faded from the memory of Time, Who dares not give reality to that Whose being I annul. To me is given The wonders of the human world to keep, Space, matter, time, and mind. Futurity Exposes now its treasure : let the sight Renew and strengthen all thy failing hope. O human Spirit ! spur thee to the goal Where virtue fixes universal peace, And midst the ebb and flow of human things, Shew somewhat stable, somewhat certain still, A lighthouse o'er the wild of dreary waves. The habitable earth is full of bliss ; Those wastes of frozen billows that were hurled By everlasting snow-storms round the poles, Where matter dared not vegetate or live. But ceaseless frost round the vast solitude Bound its broad zone of stillness, are unloosed ; And fragrant zephyrs there from spicy isles Ruffle the placid ocean-deep that rolls Its broad, bright surges to the sloping sand. Whose roar is wakened into echoings sweet To murmur through the heaven-breathing groves And melodize with man's blest nature there. Those deserts of immeasurable sand, Whose age-collected fervours scarce allowed A bird to live, a blade of grass to spring, Where the shrill chirp of the green lizard's love Broke on the sultry silentness alone, Now teem with countless rills and shady woods, Corn-fields, and pastures, and white cottages : And where the startled wilderness beheld A savage conqueror stained in kindred blood, A tigress sating with the flesh of lambs, The unnatural famine of her toothless cubs, Whilst shouts and howlings through the desert rang, Sloping and smooth, the daisy-spangled lawn, 56 QUEEN MAB. [VIII. Offering sweet incense to the sun-rise, smiles To see a babe before his mother's door, Sharing his morning's meal With the green and golden basilisk That comes to lick his feet. Those trackless deeps, where many a weary sail Has seen above the illimitable plain, Morning on night, and night on morning rise, Whilst still no land to greet the wanderer spread Its shadowy mountains on the sun-bright sea, Where the loud roarings of the tempest-waves So long have mingled with the gusty wind In melancholy loneliness, and swept The desert of those ocean solitudes, But vocal to the sea-bird's harrowing shriek, The bellowing monster, and the rushing storm, Now to the sweet and many mingling sounds Of kindliest human impulses respond. Those lonely realms bright garden-isles begem, With lightsome clouds and shining seas between, And fertile valleys, resonant with bliss, Whilst green woods overcanopy the wave, Which, like a toil-worn labourer, leaps to shore, To meet the kisses of the flowrets there. All things are recreated, and the flame Of consentaneous love inspires all life : The fertile bosom of the earth gives suck To myriads who still grow beneath her care, Rewarding her with their pure perfectness : The balmy breathings of the wind inhale Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad : Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere, Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream : No storm deforms the beaming brow of heaven, .Nor scatters in the freshness of its pride The foliage of the ever-verdant trees ; But fruits are ever ripe, flowers ever fair, And autumn proudly bears her matron grace, Kindling a flush on the fair cheek of spring. Whose virgin bloom beneath the ruddy fruit Reflects its tint and blushes into love. VIII.] QUEEN MAB. 57 The lion now forgets to thirst for blood : There might you see him sporting in the sun Beside the dreadless kid ; his claws are sheathed, His teeth are harmless, custom's force has made His nature as the nature of a lamb. Like passion's fruit, the nightshade's tempting bane Poisons no more the pleasure it bestows ; All bitterness is past; the cup of joy Unmingled mantle's to the goblet's brim, And courts the thirsty lips it fled before. But chief, ambiguous man, he that can know More misery, and dream more joy than all; Whose keen sensations thrill within his breast To mingle with a loftier instinct there, Lending their power to pleasure and to pain, Yet raising, sharpening, and refining each ; Who stands amid the ever-varying world, The burthen or the glory of the earth ; He chief perceives the change, his being notes The gradual renovation, and defines Each movement of its progress on his mind. Man, where the gloom of the long polar night Lowers o'er the snow-clad rocks and frozen soil, Where scarce the hardiest herb that braves the frost Basks in the moonlight's ineffectual glow, Shrank with the plants, and darkened with the night ; His chilled and narrow energies, his heart, Insensible to courage, truth, or love, His stunted statue and imbecile frame. Marked him for some abortion of the earth, Fit compeer of the bears that roamed around. Whose habits and enjoyments were his own; His life a feverish dream of stagnant woe : Whose meagre wants but scantily fulfilled, Apprised him ever of the joyless length Which his short being's wretchedness had reached ; His death a pang, which famine, cold, and toil Long on the mind, whilst yet the vital spark Clung to the body stubbornly, had brought ; All was inflicted here that earth's revenge Could wreak on the infringers of her law ; One curse alone was spared— the name of God. 58 QUEEN MAB. [VIH. Nor where the tropics bound the realms of day With a broad belt of mingling cloud and flame, "Where blue mists through the unmoving atmosphere Scattered the seeds of pestilence, and fed Unnatural vegetation, where the land Teemed with all earthquake, tempest, and disease, Was man a nobler being ; slavery- Had crushed him to his country's blood-stained dust; Or he was bartered for the fame of power, Which, all internal impulses destroying, Makes human will an article of trade ; Or he was changed with Christians for their gold. And dragged to distant isles, where to the sound Of the flesh-mangling scourge, he does the work Of all-polluting luxury and wealth, Which doubly visits on the tyrants' heads The long protracted fulness of their woe : Or he was led to legal butchery, To turn to worms beneath that burning sun, Where kings first leagued against the rights of men, And priests first traded with the name of God. Even where the milder zone afforded man A seeming shelter, yet contagion there, Blighting his being with unnumbered ills, Spread like a quenchless fire ; nor truth till late Availed to arrest its progress, or create That peace which first in bloodless victory waved Her snowy standard o'er this favoured clime : There man was long the train-bearer of slaves, The mimic of surrounding misery, The jackal of ambition's lion rage, The bloodhound of religion's hungry zeal. Here now the human being stands adorning This loveliest earth, with taintless body and mind ; Blest from his birth with all bland impulses, Which gently in his noble bosom wake All kindly passions and all pure desires. Him, still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing, Which from the exhaustless lore of human weal Draws on the virtuous mind, the thoughts that rise In time-destroying infiniteness, gift With self-enshrined eternity, that mocks IX.] QUEEN MAB. 59 The unprevailing hoariness of age, And man once fleeting o'er the transient scene Swift as an unremembered vision stands Immortal upon earth : no longer now He slays the lamb that looks him in the face, And horribly devours his mangled flesh, Which still avenging nature's broken law, Kindled all putrid humours in his frame, All evil passions, and all vain belief, Hatred, despair, and loathing in his mind, The germs of misery, death, disease, and crime. No longer now the winged habitants, That in the woods their sweet lives sing away, Flee from the form of man ; but gather round, And prune their sunny feathers on the hands Which little children stretch in friendly sport . Towards these dreadless partners of their play. All things are void of terror : man has lost His terrible prerogative, and stands An equal amidst equals : happiness And science dawn though late upon the earth ; Peace cheers the mind, health renovates the frame* Disease and pleasure cease to mingle here, — Reason and passion cease to combat there; Whilst each unfettered o'er the earth extend Their all-subduing energies, and wield The sceptre of a vast dominion there ; Whilst every shape and mode of matter lends Its force to the omnipotence of mind, Which from its dark mine drags the gem of truth To decorate its paradise of peace. IX. O happy Earth ! reality of Heaven ! To which those restless souls that ceaselessly Throng through the human universe, aspire ; Thou consummation of all mortal hope ! Thou glorious prize of blindly working will ! Whose rays diffused throughout all space and time, Verge to one point and blend forever there : 60 QUEEN MAB. [lX, Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place ! Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime, Languor, disease, and ignorance, dare not come : O happy Earth, — reality of Heaven ! Genius has seen thee in her passionate dreams, And dim forebodings of thy loveliness Haunting the human heart, have there entwined Those rooted hopes of some sweet place of bliss Where friends and lovers meet to part no more. Thou art the end of all desire and will, The product of all action : and the souls That by the paths of an aspiring change Have reached thy haven of perpetual peace, There rest from the eternity of toil That framed the fabric of thy perfectness. Even Time, the conqueror, fled thee in his fear ; That hoary giant, who, in lonely pride, So long had ruled the world, that nations fell Beneath his silent footstep. Pyramids, That for milleniums had withstood the tide Of human things, his storm-breath drove in sand Across that desert where their stones survived The name of him whose pride had heaped them there. Yon monarch, in his solitary pomp, Was but the mushroom of a summer day, That his light-winged footstep pressed to dust : Time was the king of earth ; all things gave way Before him, but the fixed and virtuous will, The sacred sympathies of soul and sense, That mocked his fury and prepared his fall. Yet slow and gradual dawned the morn of love ; Long lay the clouds of darkness o'er the scene, Till from its native heaven they rolled away: First, crime, triumphant o'er all hope careered Unblushing, undisguising, bold, and strong: Whilst falsehood, tricked in virtue's attributes, Long sanctified all deeds of vice and woe, Till done by her own venomous sting to death She left the moral world without a law, No longer fettering passion's fearless wing, Nor searing reason with the brand of God. Then steadily the happy ferment worked : IX.] QUEEN MAB. 61 Reason was free ; and wild though passion went Through tangled glens and wood-embosomed meeds, Gathering a garland of the strangest flowers, Yet like the bee returning to her queen, She bound the sweetest on her sister's brow, Who, meek and sober, kissed the sportive child. No longer trembling at the broken rod. Mild was the slow necessity of death: The tranquil Spirit failed beneath its grasp, Without a groan, almost without a fear, Calm as a voyager to some distant land, And full of wonder, full of hope as he. The deadly germs of languor and disease Died in the human frame, and purity Blest with all gifts her earthly worshippers. How vigorous then the athletic form of age ! How clear its open and unwrinkled brow ! Where neither avarice, cunning, pride, or care, Had stamped the seal of grey deformity On all the mingling lineaments of time. How lovely the intrepid front of youth ! Which meek- eyed courage decked with freshest grace,. Courage of soul, that dreaded not a name, And elevated will, that journeyed on Through life's phantasmal scene in fearlessness, With virtue, love, and pleasure, hand in hand. Then, that sweet bondage which is freedom's self, And rivets with sensation's softest tie The kindred sympathies of human souls. Needed no fetters of tyrannic law: Those delicate and timid impulses In nature's primal modesty arose, And with undoubting confidence disclosed The growing longings of its dawning love, Unchecked by dull and selfish chastity, That virtue of the cheaply virtuous, Who pride themselves in senselessness and frost, No longer prostitution's venomed bane Poisoned the springs of happiness and life; Woman and man, in confidence and love, Equal, and free, and pure, together trod 6 62 QUEEN MAB. [iX. The mountain-paths of virtue, which no more Were stained with blood from many a pilgrim's feet. Then, where, through distant ages, long in pride The palace of the monarch-slave had mocked Famine's faint groan, and penury's silent tear, A heap of crumbling ruins stood, and threw Year after year their stones upon the field, Wakening a lonely echo ; and the leaves Of the old thorn, that on the topmost tower Usurped the royal ensign's grandeur, shook In the stern storm that swayed the topmost tower And whispered strange tales in the whirlwind's ear. Low through the lone cathedral's roofless aisles The melancholy winds a death-dirge sung : It were a sight of awfulness to see The works of faith and slavery, so vast, So sumptuous, yet so perishing withal ! Even as the corpse that rests beneath its wall. A thousand mourners deck the pomp of death To-day, the breathing marble glows above To decorate its memory, and tongues Are busy of its life : to-morrow worms In silence and in darkness seize their prey. Within the massy prison's mouldering courts, Fearless and free the ruddy children played, Weaving gay chaplets for their innocent brows With the green ivy and the red wall-fiower, That mock the dungeon's unavailing gloom; The ponderous chains, and gratings of strong iron, There rusted amid heaps of broken stone That mingled slowly with their native earth : There the broad beam of day, which feebly once Lighted the cheek of lean captivity With a pale and sickly glare, then freely shone On the pure smiles of infant playfulness : No more the shuddering voice of hoarse despair Pealed through the echoing vaults, but soothing notes Of ivy-fingered winds and gladsome birds And merriment were resonant around. These ruins soon left not a wreck behind : Their elements, wide scattered o'er the globe. IX.] QUEEN MAB. To happier shapes were moulded, and became Ministrant to all blissful impulses : Thus human things were perfected, and earth, Even as a child beneath its mother's love, Was strengthened in all excellence, and grew Fairer and nobler with each passing year. Now Time his dusky pennons o'er the scene Closes in stedfast darkness, and the past Fades from our charmed sight. My task is done : Thy lore is learned. Earth's wonders are thine own, With all the fear and all the hope they bring. My spells are past : the present now recurs. Ah me ! a pathless wilderness remains Yet unsubdued by man's reclaiming hand. Yet, human Spirit, bravely hold thy course, Let virtue teach you firmly to pursue The gradual paths of an aspiring change : For birth, and life, and death, and that strange state Before the naked soul has found its home, All tend to perfect happiness, and urge The restless wheels of being on their way, Whose flashing spokes, instinct with infinite life, Bicker and burn to gain their destined goal. For birth but wakes the spirit to the sense Of outward shows, whose inexperienced shape New modes of passion to its frame may lend; Life is its state of action, and the store Of all events is aggregated there That variegate the eternal universe ; Death is a gate of dreariness and gloom, That leads to azure isles and beaming skies And happy regions of eternal hope. Therefore, O Spirit ! fearlessly bear on : Though storms may break the primrose on its stalk, Though frost may blight the freshness of its bloom, Yet spring's awakening breath will woo the earth, To feed with kindliest dews its favourite flower, That blooms in mossy banks and darksome glens, Lighting the greenwood with its sunny smile. Fear not then, Spirit, death's disrobing hand, So welcome when the tyrant is awake, 64 QUEEN MAB. [iX. So welcome when the bigot's hell-touch burns ; 'Tis but the voyage of a darksome hour, The transient gulf-dream of a startling sleep. Death is no foe to virtue : Earth has seen Love's brightest roses on the scaffold bloom, Mingling with freedom's fadeless laurels there, And presaging the truth of visioned bliss. Are there not hopes within thee, which this scene Of linked and gradual being has confirmed ? Whose stingings bade thy heart look further still, When to the moonlight walk by Henry led, Sweetly and sadly thou didst talk of death? And wilt thou rudely tear them from thy breast, Listening supinely to a bigot's creed, Or tamely crouching to the tyrant's rod, Whose iron thongs are red with human gore ? Never : but bravely bearing on, thy will Is destined an eternal war to wage With tyranny and falsehood, and uproot The germs of misery from the human heart. Thine is the hand whose piety would soothe The thorny pillow of unhappy crime, Whose impotence an easy pardon gains, Watching its wanderings as a friend's disease: Thine is the brow whose mildness would defy Its fiercest rage, and brave its sternest will, When fenced by power and master of the world. Thou art sincere and good; of resolute mind, Free from heart-withering custom's cold control, Of passion lofty, pure, and unsubdued. Earth's pride and meanness could not vanquish thee, And therefore art thou worthy of the boon Which thou hast now received : virtue shall keep Thy footsteps in the path that thou hast trod, And many days of beaming hope shall bless Thy spotless life of sweet and sacred love. Go, happy one, and give that bosom joy, Whose sleepless spirit waits to catch Light, life, and rapture from thy smile. The Fairy waves her wand of charm. Speechless with bliss the spirit mounts the car, That rolled beside the battlement, Bending her beamy eyes in thankfulness. IX.] QUEEN MAB. Again the enchanted steeds were yoked, Again the burning wheels inflame The steep descent of heaven's untrodden way. Fast and far the chariot flew : The vast and fiery globes that rolled Around the Fairy's palace-gate Lessened by slow degrees, and soon appeared Such tiny twinklers as the planet orbs That there attendant on the solar power With borrowed light pursued their narrower way. Earth floated then below : The chariot paused a moment there ; The Spirit then descended : The restless coursers pawed the ungenial soil, Snuffed the gross air, and then, their errand done, Unfurled their pinions to the winds of heaven. The Body and the Soul united then, A gentle start convulsed lanthe's frame : Her veiny eyelids quietly unclosed ; Moveless awhile the dark blue orbs remained : She looked around in wonder and beheld Henry, who kneeled in silence by her couch, Watching her sleep with looks of speechless love, And the bright beaming stars That through the casement shone. 6* NOTES. I. Page 15. The sun's unclouded orb Rolled through the black concave. Beyond our atmosphere, the sun would appear a rayless orb of fire in the midst of a black concave. The equal diffu- sion of its light on earth is owing to the refraction of the rays by the atmosphere, and their reflection from other bodies. Light consists either of vibrations propagated through a sub- tle medium, or of numerous minute particles repelled in all di- rections from the luminous body. Its velocity greatly ex- ceeds that of any substance with which we are acquainted: observations on the eclipses of Jupiter's satellites have de- monstrated that light takes up no more than eight minutes and seven seconds in passing from the sun to the earth, a dis- tance of 95,000,000 miles. Some idea may be gained of the immense distance of the fixed stars, when it is computed that many years would elapse before light could reach this earth from the nearest of them ; yet in one year light travels 5,422,400,000,000 miles, which is at a distance 5,707,600 times greater than that of the sun.from the earth. I. Page 15. Whilst round the chariot's way Innumerable systems rolled. The plurality of worlds, the indefinite immensity of the universe is a most awful subject of contemplation. He who rightly feels its mystery and grandeur is in no danger of se- duction from the falsehoods of religious systems, or of deify- ing the principle of the universe. It is impossible to believe DO NOTES. that the spirit that pervades this infinite machine, begat a son upon the body of a Jewish woman ; or is angered at the consequences of that necessity, which is a synonyme of itself. All that miserable tale of the Devil and Eve, and an Intercessor, with the childish mummeries of the God of the Jews, is irreconcileable with the knowledge of the stars. The works of his fingers have borne witness against him. The nearest of the fixed stars is inconceivably distant from the earth, and they are probably proportionably distant from each other. By a calculation of the velocity of light, Syrius is supposed to be at least 54,224,000,000,000, miles from the earth.* That which appears only like a thin, silvery cloud, streaking the heaven, is in effect composed of innumerable clusters of suns, each shining with its own light, and illumi- nating numbers of planets that revolve around them. Mil- lions and millions of suns are ranged around us, all attended by innumerable worlds, yet calm, regular, and harmonious, all keeping the paths of immutable necessity. IV. Page 32. These are the hired bravoes who defend The tyrant's throne. To employ murder as a means of justice, is an idea which a man of an enlightened mind will not dwell upon with plea- sure. To march forth in rank and file, with all the pomp of streamers and trumpets, for the purpose of shooting at our fellow-men as a mark ; to inflict upon them all the variety of wound and anguish ; to leave them weltering in their blood ; to wander over the field of desolation, and count the number of the dying and the dead, — are employments which in thesis we may maintain to be necessary, but which no good man will contemplate with gratulation and delight. A battle we suppose is won ; — thus truth is established ; — thus the cause of justice is confirmed ! It surely requires no com- mon sagacity to discern the connexion between this immense heap of calamities, and the assertion of truth, or the main- tenance of justice. Kings, and ministers of state, the real authors of the ca- lamity, sit unmolested in their cabinet, while those against whom the fury of the storm is directed, are, for the most part, persons who have been trepanned into the service, or who * See Nicholson's Encyclopedia, art. Light. NOTES. 69 are dragged unwillingly from their peaceful homes into the field of battle. A soldier is a man whose business it is to kill those who never offended him, and who are the innocent martyrs of other men's iniquities. Whatever may become of the abstract question of the justifiableness of war, it seems impossible that the soldier should not be a depraved and unnatural being. To these more serious and momentous considerations it may be proper to add a recollection of the ridiculousness of the military character. Its first constituent is obedience : a soldier is, of all descriptions of men, the most completely a machine ; yet his profession inevitably teaches him some- thing of dogmatism, swaggering, and self-consequence ; he is like the puppet of a showman, who, at the very time he is made to strut and swell and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know cannot assume the most insignificant ges- ture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is mov- ed by his exhibitor. — Godwin's Enquirer, Essay v. I will here subjoin a little poem, so strongly expressive of my abhorrence of despotism and falsehood, that I fear lest it never again may be depictured so vividly. This opportunity is perhaps the only one that ever will occur of rescuing it from oblivion. FALSEHOOD AND VICE. A DIALOGUE. Whilst monarchs laughed upon their thrones To hear a famished nation's groans, And hugged the wealth wrung from the woe That makes its eyes and veins o'erflow, Those thrones, high built upon the heaps Of bones where frenzied famine sleeps, Where slavery wields her scourge of iron, Red with mankind's unheeded gore. And war's mad fiends the scene environ, Mingling with shrieks a drunken roar, There vice and falsehood took their stand, High raised above the unhappy land. FALSEHOOD. Brother ! arise from the dainty fare, Which thousands have toiled and bled to bestow ; 70 NOTES. A finer feast for thine hungry ear Is the news that I bring of human woe. VICE. And, secret one, what hast thou done, To compare, in thy tumid pride, with me ? I, whose career, through the blasted year, Has been tracked by despair and agony. FALSEHOOD. What have I done ! 1 have torn the robe From baby Truth's unsheltered form, And round the desolated globe Borne safely the bewildering charm : My tyrant-slaves to a dungeon-floor Have bound the fearless innocent, And streams of fertilizing gore Flow from her bosom's hideous rent, Which this unfailing dagger gave I dread that blood ! — no more — this day Is ours, though her eternal ray Must shine upon our grave. Yet know, proud Vice, had I not given To thee the robe I stole from heaven, Thy shaoe of ugliness and fear Had never gained admission here, And know, that had I disdained to toil, But sate in my loathsome cave the while, And ne'er to these hateful sons of heaven, GOLD, MONARCHY, and MURDER given? Hadst thou with all thine art essayed One of thy games then to have played, With all thine overweening boast, Falsehood ? I tell thee thou hadst lost : — Yet wherefore this dispute ? — we tend, Fraternal to one common end : In this cold grave beneath my feet, Will our hopes, our fears, and our labours meet. FALSEHOOD. I brought my daughter, RELIGION, on earth : She smothered Reason's babes in their birth : NOTES. 71 But dreaded their mother's eye severe,— So the crocodile slunk off slily in fear, And loosed her bloodhounds from the den They started from dreams of slaughtered men, And by the light of her poison eye, Did her work o'er the wide earth frightfully ; The dreadful stench of her torches flare, Fed with human fat, polluted the air ! The curses, the shrieks, the ceaseless cries Of the many-mingling miseries, As on she trod, ascended high And trumpeted my victory ! — Brother, tell what thou hast done. I have extinguished the noon-day sun, In the carnage smoke of battles won : Famine, murder, hell, and power, Were glutted in that glorious hour Which searchless fate had stamped for me With the seal of her security For the bloated wretch on yonder throne Commanded the bloody fray to rise : Like me he joyed at the stifled moan Wrung from a nation's miseries ; While the snakes, whose slime even him defiled. In ecstasies of malice smiled : They thought 'twas theirs, — but mine the deed ! Theirs is the toil, but mine the meed, Ten thousand victims madly bleed. They dream that tyrants goad them there With poisonous war to taint the air : These tyrants on their beds of thorn, •Swell with the thoughts of murderous fame, And with their gains to lift my name, Restless they plan from night to morn : I — I do all ; without my aid Thy daughter, that relentless maid, Could never o'er a death-bed urge The fury of her venomed scourge. FALSEHOOD. Brother, well : — the world is ours ; And whether thou or I have won, 72 NOTES. The pestilence expectant lowers On all beneath yon blasted sun. Our joys, our toils, our honours meet In the milk-white and wormy winding sheet : A short-lived hope, unceasing care, Some heartless scraps of godly prayer, A moody curse, and a frenzied sleep Ere gapes the graves unclosing deep, A tyrant's dream, a coward's start, The ice that clings to a priestly heart, A judge's frown, a courtier's smile, Make the great whole for which we toil ; And, brother, whether thou or I Have done the work of misery, It little boots ; thy toil and pain, Without my aid were more than vain ; And but for thee I ne'er had sate The guardian of heaven's palace gate. V. Page 35. Thus do the generations of the earth Go to the grave, and issue from the womb. One generation passeth away and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south and turneth about unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again, according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea, yet the sea is not full f unto the place whence the rivers come, thither shall they return again. Ecclesiastes, chap. i. V. Page 35. Even as the leaves Which the keen frost wind of the waning year Has scattered on the forest soil. Now green in youth now withering on the ground ; Another race the following spring supplies ; They fall successive, and successive rise : So generations in their course decay ; So flourish these, when those are past away. Pope's Homer. NOTES. 73 V. Page 36. The mob of peasants, nobles, priests, and kings. When the wide ocean maddening whirlwinds sweep, And heave the billows of the boiling deep, Pleased we from land the reeling bark survey, And rolling mountains of the watery way. Not that we joy another's woes to see, But to reflect that we ourselves are free. So, the dread battle ranged in distant fields, Ourselves secure, a secret pleasure yields. But what more charming than to gain the height Of true philosophy ? What pure delight From Wisdom's citadel to view below, Deluded mortals, as they wandering go In quest of happiness ! ah, blindly weak ! For fame, for vain nobility they seek ; Labour for heapy treasures, night and day, And pant for power and magisterial sway. Oh, wretched mortals ! souls devoid of light, Lost in the shades of intellectual night ! Dr. Busby's Lucretius. V. Page 37. And statesmen boast Of wealth : There is no real wealth but the labour of man. Were the mountains of gold, and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer ; no one comfort would be added to the human race. In consequence of our conside- ration for the precious metals, one man is enabled to heap to himself luxuries at the expense of the necessaries of his neighbour ; a system admirably fitted to produce all the va- rieties of disease and crime, which never fail to characterize the two extremes of opulence and penury. A speculator takes pride to himself as the promoter of his country's pros- perity, who employs a number of hands in the manufacture of articles avowedly destitute of use, or subservient only to the unhallowed cravings of luxury and ostentation. The nobleman, who employs the peasants of his neighbourhood in building his palaces, until "jam pauca aratrojvgera 7 74 NOTES. regies moles relinquunt,"* flatters himself that he has gained the title of a patriot by yielding to the impulses of vanity. The shew and pomp of courts adduce the same apology for its continuance ; and many a fete has been given, many a woman has eclipsed her beauty by her dress, to be- nefit the labouring poor, and to encourage trade. Who does not see that this is a remedy which aggravates, whilst it palliates the countless diseases of society ? The poor are set to labour, — for what 1 Not the food for which they ; famish ; not the blankets for want of which their babes are frozen by the cold of their miserable hovels : not those com- forts of civilization without which civilized man is far more miserable than the meanest savage ; oppressed as he is by all its insidious evils, within the daily and taunting prospect of its innumerable benefits assiduously exhibited before him : no : for the pride of power, for the miserable isolation of pride, for the false pleasures of the hundredth part of socie- ty. No greater evidence is afforded of the wide, extended, and radical mistakes of civilized man than this fact ; those arts which are essential to his very being are held in the greatest contempt ; employments are lucrative in an inverse ratio to their usefulness ;f the jeweller, the toyman, the ac- tor, gains fame and wealth by the exercise of his useless and ridiculous art ; whilst the cultivator of the earth, he, without whom society must cease to subsist, struggles through contempt and penury, and perishes by that famine which, but for his unceasing exertions, would annihilate the rest of mankind. I will not insult common sense by insisting on the doc- trine of the natural equality of man. The question is not concerning its desirableness, but its practicability : so far as it is practicable, it is desirable. That state of human socie- ty which approaches nearer to an equal partition of its be- nefits and evils should, c&teris paribus, I be preferred: but so long as we conceive that a wanton expenditure of hu- man labour, not for the necessities, not even for the luxu- ries of the mass of society, but for the egotism and ostenta- tion of a few of its members, is defensible on the ground of public justice, so long we neglect to approximate to the re- demption of the human race. * These piles of royal structure, will soon leave but few acres for the plough. t See Rousseau, " L'Inegalite parmi les Hommes," note 7. j Making allowances on both sides. NOTES. 75 Labour is required for physical, and leisure for moral im- provement : from the former of these advantages the rich, and from the latter the poor, by the inevitable conditions of their respective situations, are precluded. A state which should combine the advantages of both, would be subjected to the evils of neither. He that is deficient in firm health, or vigorous intellect is but half a man ; hence it follows, that, to subject the labouring classes to unnecessary labour, is wantonly depriving them of any opportunities of intel- lectual improvement ; and that the rich are heaping up for their own mischief the disease, lassitude, and ennui by which their existence is rendered an intolerable burthen. English reformers exclaim against sinecures, — but the true pension-list is the rent-roll of the landed proprietors : wealth is a power usurped by the few, to compel the many to labour for their benefit. The laws which support this system derive their force from the ignorance and credulity of its victims : they are the result of a conspiracy of the few against the many, who are themselves obliged to pur- chase this pre-eminence by the loss of all real comfort. The commodities that substantially contribute to the sub- sistence of the human species form a very short catalogue, they demand from us but a slender portion of industry. If these only were produced, and sufficiently produced, the species of man would be continued. If the labour necessa- rily required to produce them were equitably 3ivi3ed among the poor, and still more, if it were equitably divided among all, each man's share of labour would be light, and his por- tion of leisure would be ample. There was a time when this leisure would have been of small comparative value : it is to be hoped that the time will come, when it will be ap- plied to the most important purposes. Those hours which are not required for the production of the necessaries of life, may be devoted to the cultivation of the understanding, the enlarging our stock of knowledge, the refining our taste, and thus opening to us new and more exquisite sour- ces of enjoyment. ********** It was perhaps necessary that a period of monopoly and oppression should subsist, before a period of cultivated equality could subsist. Savages perhaps would never have been excited to the discovery of truth and the invention of art, but by the narrow motives which such a period affords. But, surely, after the savage state has ceased, and men have 76 NOTES. set out in the glorious career of discovery and invention, monopoly and oppression cannot be necessary to prevent them from returning to a state of barbarism. — Godwin's En~ quirer, Essay II. See also Pol. Jus. Book VIII. ch. 11. It is a calculation of this admirable author, that all the conveniences of a civilized life might be produced, if socie- ty would divide the labour equally among its members, by each individual being employed in labour two hours during the day. V. Page 37. Or religion Drives his wife raving mad. I am acquainted with a lady of considerable accomplish- ments, and the mother of a numerous family, whom the Christian religion has goaded to incurable insanity. A parallel case is, I believe, within the experience of every physician. For some the approach of Death and Hell to stay, Their parents, friends, and country will betray. Dr. Busby's Lucretius. V. Page 39. Even love is sold. Not even the intercourse of the sexes is exempt from the despotism of positive institution. Law pretends even to govern the indisciplinable wanderings of passion, to put fetters on the clearest deductions of reason, and, by appeals to the will, to subdue the involuntary affections of our na- ture. Love is inevitably consequent upon the perception of loveliness. Love withers under constraint : its very es- sence is liberty : it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear ; it is there most pure, perfect, and unli- mited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve. How long then ought the sexual connexion to last 1 what law ought to specify the extent of the grievances which should limit its duration ? A husband and wife ought to continue so long united as they love each other : any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment NOTES. 77 after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. How odious an usurpation of the right of private judgment should that law be considered, which should make the ties of friend- ship indissoluble, in spite Gf the caprices, the inconstancy, the fallibility, and capacity for improvement of the human mind ! And by so much would the fetters of love be heavier and more unendurable than those of friendship, as love is more vehement and capricious, more dependant on those delicate peculiarities of imagination, and less capable of re- duction to the ostensible merits of the object. The state of society in which we exist is a mixture of feu- dal savageness and imperfect civilization. The narrow and unenlightened morality of the Christian religion is an aggravation of these evils. It is not even until lately that mankind have admitted that happiness is the sole end of the science of ethics, as of all other sciences ; and that the fanatical idea of mortifying the flesh for the love of God has been discarded. I have heard, indeed, an ignorant col- legian adduce in favour of Christianity, its hostility to every worldly feeling !* C.But if happiness be the object of morality, of all human unions and disunions ; if the worthiness of every action is to be estimated by the quantity of pleasurable sensation it is calculated to produce, then the connexion of the sexes is so long sacred as it contributes to the comfort of the parties, and is naturally dissolved when its evils are greater than its benefits." There is nothing immoral in this separation. Constancy has nothing virtuous in itself, independently of the pleasure it confers, and partakes of the temporizing spi- rit of vice in proportion as it endures tamely moral defects of magnitude in the object of its indiscreet choice. Love is free : jto promise forever to love the same woman, is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed y such a vow, in both cases, excludes us from all enquiry. The lan- guage of the votarist is this : The woman I now love may * The first Christian Emperor made a law by which seduction was pu- nished with death ; if the female pleaded her own consent, she also was punished with death : if the parents endeavoured to screen the criminals, they also were banished, and their estates were confiscated ; the slaves who might be accessary were burned alive, or forced to swallow melted lead. The very offspring of an illegal love were involved in the conse- quences of the sentence. — Gibbon's Decline and Fall, &c. vol. ii. page 210. See also, for the hatred of the primitive Christians to love, and even marriage, page 269. L ■ ^ - V, JI& -OOKt A, X* 78 NOTES. be infinitely inferior to many others ; the creed I now pro- fess may be a mass of errors and absurdities ; but I exclude myself from all future information as to the amiability of the one, and the truth of the other, resolving blindly, and in spite of conviction, to adhere to them. — Is this the lan- guage of delicacy and reason ? Is the love of such a frigid heart of more worth than its belief? The present system of constraint does no more, in the majority of instances, than make hypocrites or open ene- mies. Persons of delicacy and virtue, unhappily united to one whom they find it impossible to love, spend the loveliest season of their life in unproductive efforts to appear other- wise than they are, for the sake of the feelings of their part- ner or the welfare of their mutual offspring : those of less generosity and refinement openly avow their dissappoint- ment, and linger out the remnant of that union, which only death can dissolve, in a state of incurable bickering and ■qj hostility. The early education of their children takes its < colour from the squabbles of the parents ; they are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence, and falsehood. . ,JZ Had they been suffered to part at the moment when indif- ference rendered their union irksome, they would have been spared many years of misery: they would have connected themselves more suitably, and would have found that hap- piness in the society of more congenial partners, which is forever denied them by the despotism of marriage. They would have been, separately, useful and happy members of society, who, whilst united, were miserable, and rendered misanthropical by misery. The conviction that wedlock is indissoluble holds out the strongest of all temptations to the perverse : they indulge without restraint in acrimony, and all the little tyrannies of domestic life, when they know that their victim is without appeal. If this connexion were put on a rational basis, each would be assured that ha- bitual ill-temper would terminate in separation, and would check this vicious and dangerous propensity, Prostitution is the legitimate offspring of marriage and its accompanying errors. Women, for no other crime than having followed the dictates of a natural appetite, are driven with fury from the comforts and sympathies of society. It is less venial than murder ! and the punishment which is inflicted on her who destroys her child to escape reproach, is lighter than the life of agony and disease to which the prostitute is irrecoverably doomed. Has a woman obeyed Jt 80 NOTES. book of God, ere man can read the inscription on his heart. How would morality, dressed up in stiff stays and finery, start from her own disgusting image, should she look in the mirror of nature. VI. Page 42. To the red and baleful sun That faintly twinkles there. The north polar star, to which the axis of the earth, in its present state of obliquity, points. It is exceedingly pro- bable, from many considerations, that this obliquity will gradually diminish, until the equator coincides with the ecliptic ; the nights and days will then become equal on the earth throughout the year, and probably the seasons also. There is no great extravagance in presuming that the progress of the perpendicularity of the poles may be as ra.pid as the progress of intellect ; or that there should be a perfect identity between the moral and physical improve- ment of the human species. It is certain that wisdom is not compatible with disease, and that, in the present state of the climates of the earth, health, in the true and com- prehensive sense of the word, is out of the reach of civil- ized man. Astronomy teaches us that the earth is now in its progress, and that the poles are every year becoming more and more perpendicular to the ecliptic. The strong evidence afforded by the history of mythology, and geolo- gical researches, that some event of this nature has taken place already, affords a strong presumption that this pro- gress is not merely an oscillation, as has been surmised by some late astronomers.* Bones of animals, peculiar to the torrid zone have been found in the north of Siberia, and on the banks of the river Ohio. Plants have been found in the fossil state in the interior of Germany, which demand the present climate of Hindostan for their production.f The researches of M. BaillyJ establish the existence of a people who inhabited a tract of land in Tartary, 49 degrees north latitude, of greater antiquity than either the Indians, the Chinese, or the Chaldeans, from whom these nations de- rived their sciences and theology. We find, from the teg- * Laplace, Systeme du Monde. f Cabanis, Rapports du Physique etdu Moral del'Homme, vol. ii.p.406. j Lettres sur les Sciences, ci Voltaire. Bailly. NOTES. 81 timony of ancient writers, that Britain, Germany, and France, were much colder than at present, and that their great rivers were annually frozen over. Astronomy teaches us also, that since this period the obliquity of the earth's position has been considerably diminished. VI. Page 45. No atom of this turbulence fulfils A vague and unnecessitated task, Or acts but as it must and ought to act. Two instances will serve to render more sensible to us the principle here laid down ; we will borrow one from natural the other from moral philosophy. In a whirlwind of dust raised by an impetuous wind, however confused it may ap- pear to our eyes : in the most dreadful tempest excited by opposing winds, which convulse the waves, there is not a single particle of dust or of water that is placed by chance, that has not its sufficient cause for occupying the situation in which it is, and which does not rigorously act in the mode it should act. A geometrician who knew equally the different powers which operate in both cases, and the pro- perties of the particles which are propelled, would shew that according to the given causes, each particle acts pre- cisely as it should act, and cannot act otherwise than it does. In those terrible convulsions which sometimes agitate political societies, and which frequently bring on the over- throw of an empire, there is not a single action, a single word, a single thought, a single volition, a single passion in the agents, which concur in the revolution as destroyers, or as victims, which is not necessary, which does not act as it should act, which does not infallibly produce the effects which it should produce, according to the place occupied by these agents in the moral whirlwind. This would appear evident to an intelligence which would be in a state to seize and appreciate all the actions and re-actions of the minds and bodies of those who con- tribute to this revolution. System of Nature, vol. i. 82 NOTES. VI. Page 46. Necessity ! thou mother of the world. He who asserts the doctrine of Necessity, means that, contemplating the events which compose the moral and material universe, he beholds only an immense and unin- terrupted chain of causes and effects, no one of which could occupy any other place than it does occupy, or act in any other place than it does act. The idea of necessity is ob- tained by our experience of the connexion between objects, the uniformity of the operations of nature, the constant conjunction of similar events, and the consequent inference of one from the other. Mankind are therefore agreed in the admission of necessity, if they admit that these two circumstances take place in voluntary action. Motive is, to voluntary action in the human mind, what cause is to effect in the material universe. The word liberty, as ap- plied to mind, is analogous to the word chance, as applied to matter ; they spring from an ignorance of the certainty of the conjunction of antecedents and consequents. Every human being is irresistibly impelled to act precise- ly as he does act : in the eternity which preceded his birth, a chain of causes was generated, which, operating under the name of motives, make it impossible that any thought of his mind, or any action of his life, should be otherwise than it is. Were the doctrine of Necessity false, the human mind would no longer be a legitimate object of science ; from like causes it would be in vain that we should expect like effects : the strongest motive would no longer be paramount over the conduct ; all knowledge would be vague and undeterminate: we could not predict with any certainty that we might not meet as an enemy to-morrow, him with whom we have parted in friendship to-night ; the most probable induce- ments and the clearest reasonings would lose the invariable influence they possess. The contrary of this is demonstra- bly the fact. Similar circumstances produce the same un- variable effects. The precise character and motives of any man on any occasion being given, the moral philosopher could predict his actions with as much certainty as the na- tural philosopher could predict the effects of the mixture of any particular chemical substances. Why is the aged hus- bandman more experienced than the young beginner ? Be- cause there is a uniform, undeniable necessity in the opera- tion of the material universe. Why is the old statesman NOTES. 83 more skilful than the raw politician ? Because, relying on the necessary conjunction of motive and action, he proceeds to produce moral effects by the application of those moral causes which experience has shewn to be effectual. Some actions may be found to which we can attach no mo- tives, but these are the effects of causes with which we are unacquainted. Hence the relation which motive bears to voluntary action is that of cause to effect ; nor, placed in this point of view, is it, or ever has it been the subject of popular or philosophical dispute. None but the few fana- tics who are engaged in the Herculean task of reconciling the justice of their God with the misery of man, will longer outrage common sense by the supposition of an event with- out a cause, a voluntary action without a motive. History, politics, morals, criticism, all grounds of reasoning, all prin- ciples of science, alike assume the truth of the doctrine of Necessity. No farmer carrying his corn to market doubts the sale of it at the market price. The master of a manu- factory no more doubts that he can purchase the human labour necessary for his purposes, than that his machinery will act as they have been accustomed to act. < But, whilst none have scrupled to admit necessity as in- fluencing matter, many have disputed its dominion over mind. Independently of its militating with the received ideas of the justice of God, it is by no means obvious to a superficial enquiry. When the mind observes its own ope- rations, it feels no connexion of motive and action : but as we know " nothing more of causation than the constant con- junction of objects, and the consequent inference of one from the other, as we find that these two circumstances are universally allowed to have place in voluntary action, we may be easily led to own that they are subjected to the necessity common to all causes." The actions of the will have a regular conjunction with circumstances and charac- ters ; motive is, to voluntary action, what cause is to effect. But the only idea we can form of causation is a constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent infer- ence of one from the other : cessity is clearly established. The idea of liberty, applied metaphorically to the will, has sprung from a misconception of the meaning of the word power. What is power ? — id quod potest* that which can produce any given effect. To deny power, is to say * That which can do any thing. 84 NOTES. that nothing can or has the power to be or act. In the only true sense of the word power, it applies with equal force to the loadstone as to the human will. Do you think these motives, which I shall present, are powerful enough to rouse him ? is a question just as common as, Do you think this lever has the power to raise this weight ? The advo- cates of free will assert that the will has the power of re- fusing to be determined by the strongest motive : but the strongest motive is that which, overcoming all others, ulti- mately prevails ; this assertion therefore amounts to a de- nial of the will being ultimately determined by that motive which does determine it, which is absurd. But it is equally certain that a man can not resist the strongest motive, as that he cannot overcome a physical impossibility. The doctrine of Necessity tends to introduce a great change into the established notions of morality, and utterly to destroy religion. Reward and punishment must be con sidered, by the Necessarian, merely as motives which he would employ in order to procure the adoption or abandon- ment of any given line of conduct. Desert, in the present sense of the word, would no longer have any meaning ; and he who should inflict pain upon another for no better rea- son than that he deserved it, would only gratify his revenge under pretence of satisfying justice. It is not enough, says the advocate of free will, that a criminal should be prevent- ed from a repetition of his crime : he should feel pain ; and his torments, when justly inflicted, ought precisely to be proportioned to his fault. But utility is morality; that which is incapable of producing happiness is useless ; and though the crime of Damiens must be condemned ; yet the frightful torments which revenge, under the name of justice, inflicted on this unhappy man, cannot be supposed to have augmented, even at the long run, the stock of pleasurable sensation in the world. At the same time the doctrine of Necessity does not in the least diminish our disapprobation of vice. The conviction which all feel, that a viper is a poisonous animal, and that a tiger is constrain- ed, by the inevitable condition of his existence to devour men, does not induce us to avoid them less seduously, or even more to hesitate in destroying them : but he would surely be of a hard heart, who, meeting with a serpent on a desert island, or in a situation where it was incapable of injury, should wantonly deprive it of existence. A Necessarian is inconsequent to his own principles, if he in- NOTES. 85 dulges in hatred or contempt ; the compassion which he feels for the criminal is unmixed with a desire of injuring him : he looks with an elevated and dreadless composure upon the links of the universal chain as they pass before his eyes * whilst cowardice, curiosity and inconsistency only assail him in proportion to the feebleness and indistinctness with which he has perceived and rejected the delusions of free will. Religion is the perception of the relation in which we stand to the principle of the universe. But if the princi- ple of the universe be not an organic being the model and prototype of man, the relation between it and human beings is absolutely none. Without some insight into its will, re- specting our actions, religion is nugatory and vain. But will is only a mode of animal mind ; moral qualities also are such as only a human being can possess ; to attribute them to the principle of the universe, is to annex to it properties incompatible with any possible definition of its nature. It is probable that the word God was originally only an expression denoting the unknown cause of the known events which men perceived in the universe. By the vulgar mistake of a metaphor for a real being, of a word for a thing, it became a man, endowed with human qualities, and governing the universe as an earthly monarch governs his kingdom. Their addresses to this imaginary being, indeed, are much in the same style as those of sub- jects to a king. They acknowledge his benevolence, de- precate his anger, and supplicate his favour. But the doctrine of Necessity teaches us, that in no case could any event happen, otherwise than it did happen, and that, if God is the author of good, he is also the author of evil : that, if he is entitled to our gratitude for the one, he is entitled to our hatred for the other ; that, admitting the existence of this hypothetic being, he is also subjected to the dominion of an immutable necessity. It is plain that the same arguments which prove that God is the author of food, light, and life, prove him also to be the author of poi- son, darkness, and death. The wide-wasting earthquake, the storm, the battle, and the tyranny, are attributable to this hypothetic being in the same degree as thejairest forms of nature, sunshine, liberty, and peace. But we are taught, by the doctrine of Necessity, that there is neither good nor evil in the universe, otherwise than as the events to which we apply these epithets have 8 §6 NOTES. relation to our own peculiar mode of being. Still less than the .hypothesis of a God, will the doctrine of Neces- sity accord with the belief of a future state of punishment. God made man such as he is, and then damned him for being so ; for to say that God was the author of all good, and man the author of all evil, is to say that one man made a straight line and a crooked one, and another man made the incongruity. A Mahometan story, much to the present purpose, is re- corded, wherein Adam and Moses are introduced disputing before God in the following manner. Thou, says Moses, art Adam, whom God created, and animated with the breath of life, and caused to be worshipped by the angels and placed in Paradise, from whence mankind have been expelled for thy fault. Whereto Adam answered, Thou art Moses whom God chose for his apostle, and entrusted with his word, by giving thee the tables of the law, and whom he vouchsafed to admit to discourse with himself. How many years dost thou find the law was written before I was created ? Says Moses forty. And dost thou not find, replied Adam, these words therein, And Adam rebelled against his Lord and transgressed? Which Moses confessing, Dost thou therefore blame me, continued he, for doing that which God wrote of me, that I should do, forty years before I was created, nay, for what was decreed concerning me fifty thousand years before the creation of heaven and earth ? Sale's Prelim. Disc, to the Koran, p. 164w VII. Page 47. There is no God ! This negation must be understood solely to affect a crea- tive Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit, co-eter- nal with the universe, remains unshaken. A close examination of the validity of the proofs adduced to support any proposition, is the only secure way of attain- ing truth, on the advantages of which it is unnecessary to descant ; our knowledge of the existence of a Deity is a sub- ject of such importance, that it cannot be minutely investi- gated ; in consequence of this conviction, we proceed briefly and impartially to examine the proofs which have been adduced. It is necessary first to consider the nature of belief. When a proposition is offered to the mind, it perceives the agreement or disagreement of the ideas of which it is com- NOTES. 97 posed. A perception of their agreement is termed belief* Many obstacles frequently prevent this perception from be- ing immediate ; these the mind attempts to remove, in order that the perception may be distinct. The mind is active in the investigation, in order to perfect the state of perception of the relation which the component ideas of the proposition bear to each, which is passive : the investigation being con- fused with the perception, has induced many falsely to ima- gine that the mind is active in belief — that belief is an act of volition — in consequence of which it may be regulated by the mind. Pursuing, continuing this mistake, they have at- tached a degree of criminality to disbelief; of which, in its nature it is incapable ; it is equally incapable of merit. Belief then is a passion, the strength of which, like every other passion, is in precise proportion to the degrees of ex- citement. The degrees of excitement are three. The senses are the sources of all knowledge to the mind ; consequently their evidence claims the strongest assent. The decision of the mind, founded on our own experience derived from these sources, claims the next degree. The experience of others, which addresses itself to the former one, occupies the lowest degree. (A graduated scale, on which should be marked the capa- bilities of propositions to approach to the test of the senses, would be a just barometer of the belief that ought to be attached to them.) Consequently no testimony can be admitted which is con- trary to reason ; reason is founded on the evidence of our senses. Every proof may be referred to one of these three divi- sions : it is to be considered what arguments we receive from each of them, which should convince us of the exist- ence of a Deity. 1st. The evidence of the senses. If the Deity should appear to us, if he should convince our senses of his exist- tence, this revelation would necessarily command belief. Those to whom the Deity has thus appeared have the strong- est possible conviction of his existence. But the God of Theologians is incapable of local visibility. 2d. Reason. It is urged that man knows that whatever is, must either have had a beginning, or have existed from all eternity : he also knows, that whatever is not eternal . must have had a cause. When this reasoning is applied to 88 NOTES. the universe, it is necessary to prove that it was created: un- til that is clearly demonstrated, we may reasonably suppose that it has endured from all eternity. We must prove design before we can infer a designer. The only idea which we can form of causation is derivable from the constant con- junction of obj ects, and the consequent inference of one from the other. In a case where two propositions are diametri- cally opposite, the mind believes that which is least incom- prehensible ; — it is easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity, than to conceive a being beyond its limits capable of creating it ; if the mind sinks beneath the weight of one, is it an alleviation to increase the intole- rability of the burthen ? The other argument, which is founded on a man's know- ledge of his own existence, stands thus. A man knows not only that he now is, but that once he was not ; consequently there must have been a cause. But our idea of causation is alone derivable from the constant conjunction of objects and the consequent inference of one from the other ; and, rea- soning experimentally,we can only infer from effects, causes exactly adequate to those effects. But there certainly is a generative power which is effected by certain instruments ; we cannot prove that it is inherent in these instruments ; nor is the contrary hypothesis capable of demonstration ; we admit that the generative power is incomprehensible ; but to suppose that the same effect is produced by an eter- nal, omniscient, omnipotent being, leaves the cause in the same obscurity, but renders it more incomprehensible. 3d. Testimony. It is required that testimony should not be contrary to reason. The testimony that the Deity con- vinces the senses of men of his existence, can only be ad- mitted by us, if our mind considers it less probable that these men should have been deceived, than that the Deity should have appeared to them. Our reason can never ad- mit the testimony of men, who not only declare that they were eye-witnesses of miracles, but that the Deity was ir- rational : for he commanded that he should be believed, he proposed the highest rewards for faith, eternal punishments for disbelief. We can only command voluntary actions ; belief is not an act of volition; the mind is even passive, or involuntarily active ; from this it is evident that we have no sufficient testimony, or rather that testimony is insuffi- cient to prove the being of a God. It has been before shown that it cannot be deduced from reason. They alone then, NOTES. 89 who have been convinced by the evidence of the senses, can believe it. Hence it is evident that, having no proofs from either of the three sources of conviction, the mind cannot believe the existence of a creative God ; it is also evident, that, as belief is a passion of the mind, no degree of criminality is attacha- ble to disbelief; and that they only are reprehensible who neglect to remove the false medium through which their mind views any subject of discussion. Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the exist- ence of a Deity. God is an hypothesis, and as such, stands in need of proof ; the onus probandi* rests on the theist. Sir Isaac Newton says : Hypothesis non jingo, quicquid enim ex phceno- menis non deducitur, hypothesis vocanda est, et hypothe- sis vel metaphysics, vel physics, vel qualitatum occulta- rum, seu mechanics, in philosophia locum non habent.\ To all proofs of the existence of a creative God apply this valuable rule. We see a variety of bodies possessing a va- riety of powers : we merely know their effects ; we are in a state of ignorance with respect to their essences and cau- ses. These Newton calls the phenomena of things ; but the pride of philosophy is unwilling to admit its ignorance of their causes. From the phenomena which are the ob- jects of our senses, we attempt to infer a cause, which we call God, and gratuitously endow it with all negative and contradictory qualities. From this hypothesis we invent this general name to conceal our ignorance of causes and essences. The being called God by no means answers with the conditions prescribed by Newton ; it bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the igno- rance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar. Words have beed used by sophists for the same purposes, from the occult qualities of the peripatetics to the effluvium of Boyle, and the crinities or nebula, of Herschel. God is represented as infinite, eternal, incomprehensible ; he is contained under every predicate in non that the lo- gic of ignorance could fabricate. Even his worshippers * The burthen of proof. 1 1 do not invent hypotheses ; for whatever is not deduced from pheno- mena is to be called an hypothesis ; and hypothesis, either metaphysical or physical, or grounded on occult qualities, should not be allowed any room in philosophy. 90 NOTES. allow that it is impossible to form any idea of him: they exclaim with the French poet, Pour dire ce quHl est, ilfaut etre lui-meme.* Lord Bacon says, that " Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation : all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not ; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds of men ; there- fore Atheism did never perturb states: for it makes men wary of themselves, as looking no farther, and Ave see th& times inclined to Atheism (as the time of Augustus Caesar) were civil times ; but Superstition hath been the confusion of many states, andbringeth in a new pri?num mobile, that ravisheth all the spheres of Government." Bacon's Moral Essay on Superstition. The primary theology of man made him first fear and worship even the elements, gross and material objects, he then paid his adorations to the presiding agents of the ele- ments, to inferior genii, to heroes, or to men endowed with great qualities. By continuing to reflect he thought to sim- plify things, by submitting all nature to a single agent, to a spirit, to a universal soul, which put this nature, and its parts into motion. In ascending from cause to cause, man- kind have ended, by seeing nothing, and it is in the midst of this obscurity, that they have placed their God : it is in this dark abyss, that their restless imagination is always labouring to form chimeras, which will afflict them, until a knowledge of nature shall dissipate the phantoms which they have always so vainly adored. If we wish to render an account to ourselves, of our ideas respecting the Deity, we shall be obliged to confess that by the word of God, men have never been able to designate any thing else but the most hidden, the most remote, the most unknown cause of the effects which they perceive ; they only make use of this word, when the springs of natural and known causes cease to be visible to them : the instant they lose the thread, or their understanding can no longer follow the chain of these causes, they cut the knot of their difficulty and terminate their researches by calling God the last of these causes, that is to say, that which is beyond all causes with which they are acquainted. Thus they merely assign a vague denomination to an unknown cause, at which their * To tell what he is, you must be himself. NOTES. 91 indolence or the limits of their information compels them to stop. Whenever we are told, that God is the author of any phenomenon, that signifies that we are ignorant how such a phenomenon can be produced, with the assistance only of the natural powers or causes with which we are acquainted. It is thus that the generality of mankind, whose lot is igno- rance, attribute to the Deity, not only the uncommon effects which strike them, but even the most simple events, whose causes are the most easily discoverable, to all who have had the opportunity of reflecting on them. In a word, man has always respected the unknown causes of those surprising effects, which his ignorance prevented him from unravelling. It was upon the ruins of nature that men first raised the imaginary colossus of a Deity. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, a know- ledge of nature is calculated to destroy them. In proportion as man becomes informed, his powers and resources increase with his knowledge, the sciences, the conservative arts, and industry furnish him with assistance, experience inspires him with confidence, or procures him the means of resisting the efforts of many causes, which cease to alarm him, as soon as he becomes acquainted with them. In a word, his terrors are dissipated in the same proportion .as his mind is enlightened. A well informed man ceases to be superstitious. It is never but on trust, that whole nations worship the God of their fathers and their priests ; authority, confidence, submission, and custom, to them supply the place of proofs and conviction ; they prostrate themselves and pray, because their fathers have taught them to prostrate themselves and pray, but wherefore did the latter kneel? Because in remote periods, their guides and regulators taught them it was a duty. "Worship and believe," said they, "gods which you cannot comprehend, rely on our profound wisdom, we know more than you concerning the Deity.' 1 " But why should I rely on you ?" " Because it is the will of God, be- cause he will punish you if you dare to resist." " But is not this God the thing in question?" Thus men have always been satisfied with this vicious circle, the indolence of their minds led them to believe the shorter mode was to rely up- on the opinions of others. All religious notions are founded upon authority alone, all the religions of the world forbid investigation, and will not permit reasoning: it is authority which requires us to believe in God, this God himself is only founded upon the authority of some men who pretend to 92 NOTES. know him, and to be sent by him to announce him to the world. A God made by men has doubtless need of men to make him known to men. Is it then only, for the priests of the inspired, for meta- physicians, that a conviction of the existence of a God is reserved, and which is nevertheless said to be necessary to all mankind. But do we find a harmony of theological opinion among the inspired, or the reflective, in the different parts of the world ? Are those even who profess to worship the same God agreed respecting him ? Are they satisfied with the proofs of his existence which their colleagues bring forward ? Do they unanimously subscribe to the ideas which they adduce respecting his nature, his conduct, and the mode of understanding his pretended oracles ? Is there a country throughout the earth, in which the knowledge is really perfected. Has it assumed in any quarter the con- sistency, and uniformity, which we perceive human know- ledge to have assumed, in the most trifling arts, in trades the most despised. The words spirit, immateriality, cre- ation , predestination, grace, this crowd of subtile distinc- tions with which theology, in some countries, is universally filled, these ingenious inventions, imagined by the succes- sive reasoners of ages, have, alas ! only embroiled the ques- tion, and never has the science, the most important to man- kind, been able to acquire the least stability. For thou- sands of years, have these idle dreamers transmitted to each other the task of meditating on the Deity, of discovering his secret paths, of inventing hypotheses calculated to solve this important enigma. The little success they have met with, has not discouraged theological vanity. God has al- ways been talked of, mankind have cut each other's throats for him, and this great being still continues to be the most unknown, and the most sought after. Fortunate would it have been for mankind if confining themselves to the visible objects imwhich they are interest- ed, they had employed in perfecting true science, laws, mo- rals, and education, half the exertions they have made in their researches after a Deity. They would have been still wiser and more fortunate, could they have resolved to leave their blind guides to quarrel among themselves, and to sound the depths calculated only to turn their brains without med- dling with their senseless disputes. But it is the very es- sence of ignorance to attach importance to what it does not understand. Human vanity is such that the mind becomes NOTES. 93 irritated by difficulty. In proportion as an object fades from our sight do we exert ourselves to seize it, because it then stimulates our pride, it excites our curiosity, and becomes interesting. In contending for his God, every one in fact is only contending for the interests of his own vanity, which of all the passions, produced by the mal-organization of society, is the most prompt to take alarm, and the most calculated to give birth to great absurdities. If laying aside for a moment the gloomy ideas which the- ology gives us of a capricious God, whose partial and des- potic decrees decide the fates of men, we fix our eyes upon the pretended goodness which all men,even whilst trembling before this God, agree in giving to him, if we suppose him to be actuated by the project which is attributed to him, of having only laboured for his own glory, of exacting the ado- ration of intelligent beings, of seeking only in his works, the welfare of the human race ; how can we reconcile his views and dispositions with the truly invincible ignorance in which this God, so good and glorious, leaves the greater part of mankind respecting himself? If God wishes to be known, beloved, and praised, why does he not reveal himself under some favourable features, to all intelligent beings by whom he wishes to be loved and worshipped ? Why does he not manifest to all the earth in an unequivocal manner, much more calculated to convince us, than by these particular re- velations which seem to accuse the Deity of an unjust par- tiality for some of his creatures ? Would not the omnipo- tent possess more convincing means of revealing himself to mankind than these ridiculous metamorphoses, these pre- tended incarnations, which are attested to us by writers who so little agree among themselves in the recitals they give of them ? Instead of so many miracles invented to prove the divine mission, of so many legislators revered by the differ- ent nations of the world, could not the supreme being con- vince in an instant the human mind of the things which he chose to make known to it % Instead of suspending the sun in the vault of the firmament, instead of dispersing the stars and the constellations, which occupy space without order, would it not have been more conformable to the views of a God so jealous of his glory, and so well disposed to man, to write in a mode not liable to be disputed, his name, his at- tributes, and his unchangeable will in everlasting charac- ters, equally legible to all the inhabitants of the earth 1 No one could then have doubted the existence of a God, his 94 NOTES. manifest will, his invisible intentions. Under the eye of this terrible Deity, no one would have had the audacity to violate his ordinances, no mortal would have dared to place him- self in the situation of drawing down his wrath ; and lastly, no man would have had the effrontery to impose on his fel- low creatures, in the name of the Deity, or to interpret his will according to his own fancy. In fact, even should the existence of the theological God be admitted, and the reality of the discordant attributes which are given to him, nothing could be inferred from it, to authorise the conduct or the modes of worship, which we are told to observe towards him. Theology is truly the tub of the Danaides. By dint of contradictory qualities and rash assertions, it has so trammelled, as it were, its God, that it has made it impossible for him to act. If he is infinitely good, what reason have we to fear him ? If he is infinitely wise, why should we be uneasy for our future state? If he knows all, why inform him of our wants, and tease him with our prayers 1 If he is omnipresent, why raise temples to him ? If he is master of all, Why sacrifice and make offer- ings to him ? If he is just, how can we believe that he pu- nishes creatures whom he has afflicted with weakness ? If grace does all in them, for what reason should he reward them ? If he is omnipotent, how can we offend, how resist him ? If he is reasonable, how could he be incensed against his blind creatures to whom he has only left the liberty of falling into error 1 If he is immutable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees ? If he is in- comprehensible, why do we busy ourselves in endeavouring to understand him 7 IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS NOT THE UNIVERSE CONVINCED ? If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the clearest and most evident ? — System of Nature, London, 1781. The enlightened and benevolent Pliny thus publicly pro- fesses himself an atheist : — For which reason, I consider that the enquiry after the form and figure of the Deity, must be attributed to human weakness. Whatever God may be (if indeed there be one] and wherever he may exist, he must be all sense, all sight, all hearing, all life, all mind, self-existent. * * * * But it is a great consolation to man, with all his infirmities, to reflect that God himself cannot do all things : for he cannot inflict on himself death, even if he should wish to die, that best of gifts to man amidst the cares and sufferings of life ; NOTES. 95 neither can he make men eternal, nor raise the dead, nor prevent those who have lived, from living, nor those who have borne honours from wearing them ; he has no power over the past, except that of oblivion, and (to relax our gra- vity awhile, and indulge in a joke,) he cannot prevent twice ten from being twenty, and many other things of a similar nature. From these observations it is clearly apparent that the powers of nature are what we call God. Plin. Nat. Hist. The consistent Newtonian is necessarily an atheist. See Sir W. Drummond's Academical Questions, chapter iii. Sir W. seems to consider the atheism to which it leads, as a sufficient presumption of the falsehood of the system of gravitation ; but surely it is more consistent with the good faith of philosophy to admit a deduction from facts, than a hypothesis incapable of proof, although it might militate with the obstinate preconceptions of the mob. Had this author, instead of inveighing against the guilt and absurdi ty of atheism, demonstrated its falsehood, his conduct would have been more suited to the modesty of the sceptic, and the toleration of the philosopher. All things are made by the power of God, yet, doubtless, because the power of nature is the power of God : besides we are unable to understand the power of God, so far as we are ignorant of natural causes : therefore we foolishly re- cur to the power of God whenever we are unacquainted' with the natural cause of any thing, or in other words, with the power of God. Spinoza^ Tract. Theologico, Pol chap. i. p. 14. VII. Page 48. Ahasuerus, rise ! Ahasuerus the Jew crept forth from the dark cave of Mount Carmel. Near two thousand years have elapsed since he was first goaded by never-ending restlessness, to rove the globe from pole to pole. When our Lord was wea- ried with the burthen of his ponderous cross, and wanted to rest before the door of Ahasuerus, the unfeeling wretch drove him away with brutality. The Saviour of mankind, staggered, sinking under the heavy load, but uttered no complaint. An angel of death appeared before Ahasuerus, and exclaimed indignantly, " Barbarian ! thou hast denied 96 NOTES. rest to the Son of Man ; be it denied thee also, until he conies to judge the world." A black demon, let loose from hell upon Ahasuerus, goads him now from country to country ; he is denied the conso- lation which death affords, and precluded from the rest of the peaceful grave. Ahasuerus crept forth from the dark cave of Mount Car- mel — he shook the dust from his beard — and taking up one of the sculls heaped there, hurled it down the eminence: it rebounded from the earth in shivered atoms. This was my father ! roared Ahasuerus. Seven more sculls rolled down from rock to rock ; while the infuriate Jew, following them with ghastly looks, exclaimed— And these were my wives ! He still continued to hurl down scull after scull, roar- ing in dreadful accents — And these, and these, and these were my children ! They could die ; but, I ! reprobate wretch, alas ! I cannot die ! Dreadful beyond conception is the judgment that hangs over me. Jerusalem fell — I crushed the sucking babe, and precipitated myself into the destructive flames. I cursed the Romans — but, alas ! alas ! ; the restless curse held me by the hair, and I could not die ! Rome the giantess fell — I placed myself before the falling statue — she fell and did not crush me. Nations sprung up and disappeared before me ; but I remained and did not die. From cloud-encircled cliffs did I precipitate myself into the ocean ; but the foaming billows cast me upon the shore, and the burning arrow of existence pierced my cold heart again. Heaped into Etna's flaming abyss, and roared with the giants for ten long months, polluting with my groans the Mount's sulphureous mouth — ah ! ten long months. The volcano fermented, and in a fiery stream of lava cast me up. I lay torn by the torture-snakes of hell amid the glowing cinders, and yet continued to exist. A forest was on fire : I darted on wings of fury and despair into the crackling wood. Fire dropped upon me from the trees, but the flames only singed my limbs ; alas ; it could not consume them. I now mixed with the butchers of mankind, and plunged in the tempest of the raging battle. I roared defiance to the infu- " riate Gaul, defiance to the victorious German ; but arrows and spears rebounded in shivers from my body. The Sara* cen's flaming sword broke upon my scull ; balls in vain hiss- ed upon me : the lightnings of battle glared harmless around my loins ; in vain did the elephant trample on me, in vain the iron hoof of the wrathful steed ! The mine, big with NOTES. 97 destructive power, burst upon me, and hurled me high in the air — I fell on heaps of smoking limbs, but was only- singed. The giant's steel club rebounded from my body; the executioner's hand could not strangle me ; the tiger's tooth could not pierce me, nor would the hungry lion in the circus devour me. I cohabited with poisonous snakes, and pinched the red crest of the dragon. The serpent stung, but could not destroy me ; the dragon tormented, but dared not to devour me. I now provoked the fury of tyrants ; I said to Nero, Thou art a bloodhound ! I said to Christiern, Thou art a blood-hound ! I said to Muley Ismail, Thou art a bloodhound ! The tyrants invented cruel torments, but did not kill me. Ha ! not to be able to die — not to be able to die — not to be permitted to rest after the toils of life— to be doomed to be imprisoned for ever in the clay-formed dungeon — to be forever clogged with this worthless body, its load of diseases and infirmities — to be condemned to hold for milleniums that yawning monster Sameness and Time, that hungry hyena, ever bearing children, and ever devouring again her offspring ! — Ha ! not to be permitted to die ! Awful avenger in heaven, hast thou in thine ar- moury of wrath a punishment more dreadful ? then let it thunder upon me ; command a hurricane to sweep me down to the foot of Carmel, that I there may lie extended : may pant, and writhe, and die ! This fragment is the translation of part of some German work, whose title I have vainly endeavoured to discover. I picked it up, dirty and torn, some years ago, in Lincoln's- Inn-Fields. VII. Page 50. I will beget a Son and he shall bear The sins of all the world. A book is put into our hands when children, called the Bible, the purport of whose history is briefly this : That God made the earth in six days, and there planted a delightful garden, in which he placed the first pair of human beings. In the midst of the garden he planted a tree, whose fruit, although within their reach, they were forbidden to touch. That the Devil, in the shape of a snake, persuaded them to eat of this fruit ; in consequence of which God condemned both them and their posterity yet unborn to satisfy his jus- tice by their eternal misery. That four thousand years after 9 98 NOTES. these events, (the human race in the meanwhile having gone unredeemed to perdition,) God engendered with the betrothed wife of a carpenter in Judea, (whose virginity was nevertheless uninjured,) and begat a son whose name was Jesus Christ : and who was crucified and died, in order that no more men might be devoted to hell-fire, he bearing the burden of his Father's displeasure by proxy. The book states, in addition, that the soul of whoever disbelieves his sacrifice will be burned with everlasting fire. During many ages of misery and darkness this story gained implicit belief; but at length men arose who suspect- ed that it was a fable and imposture, and that Jesus Christ, so far from being a God, was only a man like themselves. But a numerous set of men, who derived and still derive immense emoluments from this opinion, in the shape of a popular belief, told the vulgar, that if they did not believe in the Bible, they would be damned to all eternity ; and burned, imprisoned, and poisoned all the unbiassed and un- connected enquirers who occasionally arose. They still oppress them, so far as the people, now become more en- lightened, will allow. The belief in all that the Bible contains is called Christi- anity. A Roman Governor of Judea, at the instances of a priest-led mob, crucified a man called Jesus, eighteen centu- ries ago. He was a man of pure life, who desired to rescue his countrymen from the tyranny of their barbarous and degrading superstitions. The common fate of all who de- sire to benefit mankind awaited him. The rabble, at the instigation of the priests, demanded his death, although his very judge made public acknowledgment of his innocence. Jesus was sacrificed to the honour of that God with whom he was afterwards confounded. It is of importance, there- fore, to distinguish between the pretended character of this being, as the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, and and his real character as a man, who, for a vain attempt to reform the world, paid the forfeit of his life to that over- bearing tyranny which has since so long desolated the uni- verse in his name. Whilst the one, is a hypocritical demon who announces himself as the God of compassion and peace, even whilst he stretches forth his blood-red hand with the sword of discord to waste the earth, having con- fessedly devised this scheme of desolation from eternity ; the other stands in the foremost list of those true heroes, who have died in the glorious martyrdom of liberty, and have NOTES. 99 braved torture, contempt, and poverty, in the cause of suf- fering humanity .* The vulgar, ever in extremes, became persuaded that the crucifixion of Jesus was a supernatural event. Testimonies of miracles, so frequent in unenlightened ages, were not wanting to prove that he was something divine. This be- lief, rolling through the lapse of ages, met with the reveries of Plato and the reasonings of Aristotle, and acquired force and extent, until the divinity of Jesus became a dogma, which to dispute was death, which to doubt was infamy. Christianity is now the established religion : he who at- tempts to impugn it, must be contented to behold murder- ers and traitors take precedence of him in public opinion ; though, if his genius be equal to his courage, and assisted by a peculiar coalition of circumstances, future ages may exalt him to a divinity, and persecute others in his name, as he was persecuted in the name of his predecessor in the homage of the world. The same means that have supported every other popu- lar belief, have supported Christianity. War, imprisonment, assassination, and falsehood ; deeds of unexampled and in- comparable atrocity have made it what it is. The blood shed by the votaries of the God of mercy and peace, since the establishment of his religion, would probably suffice to drown all other sectaries now on the habitable globe. We derive from our ancestors a faith thus fostered and support- ed y we quarrel, persecute, and hate for its maintenance. Even under a government which, whilst it infringes the very right of thought and speech, boasts of permitting the liberty of the press, a man is pilloried and imprisoned because he is a Deist, and no one raises his voice in the indignation of out- raged humanity. But it is ever a proof that the falsehood of a proposition is felt by those who use coercion, not reasoning, to procure its admission \ and a dispassionate observer would feel himself more powerfully interested in favour of a man, who, depending on the truth of his opinions, simply stated his reasons for entertaining them, than in that of his aggres- sor, who, daringly avowed his unwillingness or incapacity to answer them by argument proceeded to repress the ener- gies and break the spirit of their promulgator by that tor- ture and imprisonment whose infliction he could command. * Since writing this note, T have seen reason to suspect, that Jesus was an ambitious man, who aspired to the throne of Judea. 100 NOTES. Analogy seems to favour the opinion, that as, like other systems, Christianity has arisen and augmented, so like them it will decay and perish ; that, as violence, darkness, and deceit, not reasoning and persuasion, have procured its admission among mankind, so, when enthusiasm has sub- sided, and time, that infallible controverter of false opinions has involved its pretended evidences in the darkness of an- tiquity, it will become obsolete ; that Milton's poem alone will give permanency to the remembrance of its absurdities ; and that men will laugh as heartily at grace, faith, redemp- tion, and original sin, as they now do at the metamorpho- ses of Jupiter, the miracles of Romish saints, the efficacy of witchcraft, and the appearance of departed spirits. Had the Christian religion commenced and continued by the mere force of reasoning and persuasion, the preceding analogy would be inadmissible. We should never speculate on the future obsoleteness of a system perfectly conforma- ble to nature and reason ; it would endure so long as they endured ; it would be a truth as indisputable as the light of the sun, the criminality of murder, and other facts, whose evidence, depending on our organization and relative situa- tions, must remain acknowledged as satisfactory, so long as man is man. It is an incontrovertible fact, the consideration of which ought to repress the hasty conclusions of creduli- ty, or moderate its obstinacy in maintaining them, that, had the Jews not been a fanatical race of men, had even the re- solution of Pontius Pilate been equal to his candour, the Christian religion never could have prevailed, it could not even have existed ; on so feeble a thread hangs the most cherished opinion of a sixth of the human race ! When will the vulgar learn humility ? When will the pride of igno- rance blush at having believed before it could comprehend? Either the Christian religion is true, or it is false: if true, it comes from God, and its authenticity can admit of doubt and dispute no further than its omnipotent author is willing to allow. Either the power or the goodness of God is called in question, if he leaves those doctrines most essen- tial to the well-being of man in doubt and dispute ; the only ones which, since their promulgation have been the subject of unceasing cavil, the cause of irreconcileable hatred. If God has spoken, why is the universe not convinced ? There is this passage in the Christian Scriptures ; " Those who obey not God, and believe not the Gospel of his Son, shall be punished with everlasting destruction." This is the NOTES. 101 pivot upon which all religions turn : they all assume that it is in our power to believe or not to believe ; whereas the mind can only believe that which it thinks true. A human being can only be supposed accountable for those actions which are influenced by his will. But belief is utterly dis- tinct from, and unconnected with volition ; it is the appre- hension of the agreement or disagreement of the ideas that compose any proposition. Belief is a passion, or involun- tary operation of the mind, and, like other passions, its in- tensity is precisely proportionate to the degrees of excite- ment. Volition is essential to merit or demerit. But the Christian religion attaches the highest possible degrees of merit and demerit to that which is worthy of neither, and which is totally unconnected with the peculiar faculty of the mind; whose presence is essential to their being. Christianity was intended to reform the world : had an all-wise being planned it, nothing is more improbable than that it should have failed : omniscience would infallibly have foreseen the inutility of such a scheme which experience demonstrates, to this age, to have been utterly unsuccessful. Christianity inculcates the necessity of supplicating the Deity. Prayer may be considered under two points of view ; as an endeavour to change the intentions of God, or as a formal testimony of our obedience. But the former case supposes that the caprices of a limited intelligence can occasionally instruct the Creator of the world how to regu- late the universe ; and the latter a certain degree of servili- ty analogous to the loyalty demanded by earthly tyrants. Obedience indeed is only the pitiful and cowardly egotism of him who thinks that he can do something better than reason. Christianity, like all other religions, rests upon miracles, prophecies, and martyrdoms. No religion ever existed, which had not its prophets, its attested miracles, and, above all, crowds of devotees, who would bear patiently the most horrible tortures to prove its authenticity. It should appear that in no case can a discriminating mind subscribe to the genuineness of a miracle. A miracle is an infraction of na- ture's law, by a supernatural cause ; by a cause acting be- yond that eternal circle within which all things are includ- ed. God breaks through the law of nature, that he may convince mankind of the truth of that revelation which, in spite of his precautions, has been, since its introduction, the subject of unceasing schism and cavil. 9* 102 NOTES. Miracles resolve themselves into the following question :* Whether it is more probable the laws of nature, hitherto so immutably harmonious, should have undergone violation, or that a man should have told a lie 1 Whether it is more probable that we are ignorant of the natural cause of an event, or that we know the supernatural one 1 That, in old times, when the powers of nature were less known than at present, a certain set of men were themselves deceived, or had some hidden motive for deceiving others ; or that God begat a son, who, in his legislation, measuring merit by be- lief, evidenced himself to be totally ignorant of the powers of the human mind — of what is voluntary, and what is the contrary 1 We have many instances of men telling lies ; — none of an infraction of nature's laws, those laws of whose government alone we have any knowledge or experience. The records of all nations afford innumerable instances of men deceiving others either from vanity or interest, or themselves being deceived by the limitedness of their views and their igno- rance of natural causes : but where is the accredited case of God having come upon earth, to give the lie to his own crea- tions ? There would be something truly wonderful in the appearance of a ghost ; but the assertion of a child that he saw one as he passed through the church-yard, is univer- sally admitted to be less miraculous. But even supposing that a man should raise a dead body to life before our eyes, and on this fact rest his claim to be- ing considered the son of God ; — the Humane Society re- stores drowned persons, and because it makes no mystery of the method it employs, its members are not mistaken for the sons of God. All that we have a right to infer from our ignorance of the cause of any event is that we do not know it : had the Mexicans attended to this simple rule when they heard the cannon of the Spaniards, they would not have considered them as gods : the experiments of mo- dern chemistry would have defied the wisest philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome to have accounted for them on natural principles. An author of strong common sense has observed, that " a miracle is no miracle at second hand ;" he might have added, that a miracle is no miracle in any case ; for until we are acquainted with all natural causes, we have no reason to imagine others. * See Hume's Essay, vol. ii. page 121. NOTES. 103 There remains to be considered another proof of Chris- tianity — Prophecy. A book is written before a certain event, in which this event is foretold ; how could the prophet have foreknown it without inspiration ? how could he have been inspired without God ? The greatest stress is laid on the prophecies of Moses and Hosea on the dispersion of the Jews, and that of Isaiah concerning the coming of the Mes- siah. The prophecy of Moses is a collection of every pos- sible cursing and blessing; and it is so far from being mar- vellous that the one of dispersion should have been fulfilled, that it would have been more surprising if, out of all these none should have taken effect. In Deuteronomy, chapter xxviii. verse 64, where Moses explicitly foretels the disper- sion, he states that they shall there serve Gods of wood and stone : " And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from the one end of the earth even to the other, and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither thou nor thy fathers have known, even gods of wood and stone." The Jews are at this day remarkably tenacious of their religion. Moses also declares that they shall be subjected to these causes for disobedience to his ritual ; " And it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the Lord thy God, to observe to do all the commandments and statutes which I command you this day, that all these cur- ses shall come upon thee." Is this the real reason ? The third, fourth, and fifth chapters of Hosea, are a piece of im- modest confession. The indelicate type might apply in a hundred senses to a hundred things. The fifty-third chap- ter of Isaiah is more explicit, yet it does not exceed in clear- ness the oracles of Delphos. The historical proof that Mo- ses, Isaiah, and Hosea, did write when they are said to have written, is far from being clear and circumstantial. But prophecy requires proof in its character as a miracle : we have no right to suppose that a man foreknew future events from God, until it is demonstrated that he neither could know them by his own exertions, nor that the writ- ings which contain the prediction could possibly have been fabricated after the event pretended to be foretold. It is more probable that writings, pretending to divine inspira- tion, should have been fabricated after the fulfilment of their pretended prediction, than that they should have real- ly been divinely inspired ; when we consider that the latter supposition makes God at once the creator of the human mind and ignorant of its primary powers, particularly as 104 NOTES. we have numberless instances of false religions, and forged prophecies, of things long past, and no accredited case of God having conversed with men directly or indirectly. It is also possible that the description of an event might have foregone its occurrence j but this is far from being a legiti- mate proof of a divine revelation, as many men, not pre- tending to the charactar of a prophet, have nevertheless, in this sense, prophesied. Lord Chesterfield was never yet taken for a prophet, even by a bishop,yet he uttered this remarkable prediction : " The despotic government of France is screwed up to the highest pitch ; a revolution is fast approaching : that revolution, I am convinced, will be radical and sanguinary.' 1 This ap- peared in the letters of the prophet long before the accom- plishment of this wonderful prediction. Now, have these particulars come to pass, or have they not ? If they have, how could the Earl have foreknown them without inspiration ? If we admit the truth of the Christian religion on testimony such as this, we must admit on the same strength of evidence, that God has affixed the highest rewards to belief, and the eternal tortures of the never-dying worm to disbelief; both of which have been demonstrated to be involuntary. The last proof of the Christian religion depends on the in- fluence of the Holy Ghost. Theologians divide the influence of the Holy Ghost into its ordinary and extraordinary modes of operation. The latter is supposed to be that which inspired the prophets and apostles ; and the former to be the grace of God, which summarily makes known the truth of his revela- tion, to those whose minds are fitted for its reception by a submissive perusal of his word. Persons convinced in this manner, can do any thing but account for their conviction, de- scribe the time at which it happened, or the manner in which it came in upon them. It is supposed to enter the mind by other channels than those of the senses, and therefore pro- fesses to be superior to reason founded on their experience. Admitting, however, the usefulness or possibility of a di- vine relation, unless we demolish the foundations of all hu- man knowledge, it is requisite that our reason should pre- viously demonstrate its genuineness : for, before we extin- guish the steady ray of reason and common sense, it is fit that we should discover whether we cannot do without their assistance, whether or no there be any other which may suffice to guide us through the labyrinth of life* : for, if a * See Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, book iv. chap, xix., on Enthusiasm. NOTES. 105 man is to be inspired upon all occasions, if he is to be sure of a thing because he is sure, if the ordinary operations of the spirit are not to be considered very extraordinary modes of demonstration, if enthusiasm is to usurp the place of proof, and madness that of sanity, all reasoning is superflu- ous. The Mahometan dies fighting for his prophet, the In- dian immolates himself at the chariot wheels of Brahma, the Hottentot worships an insect, the Negro a bunch of fea- thers, the Mexican sacrifices human victims. Their degree of conviction must certainly be very strong ■ it cannot arise from conviction, it must from feelings, the reward of their prayers. If each of these should affirm, in opposition to the strongest possible arguments, that inspiration carried internal evidence,! fear their inspired brethren, the orthodox mission- aries would be so uncharitable as to pronounce them obstinate. Miracles cannot be received as testimonies of a disputed fact, because all human testimony has ever been insufficient to establish the possibility of miracles. That which is inca- pable of proof itself, is no proof of any thing else. Pro- phecy has also been rejected by the test of reason. Those, then, who have been actually inspired, are the only true be- lievers in the Christian religion. Mox numine viso Virginei tumuere sinus, innuptaque mater Arcano stupuit compleri viscera partu Auctorem peritura suum. Mortalia corda. Artificem texere poli, latuitque sub uno Pectore, qui totum late complectitur orbem. Claudiam, Carmen Paschate.* Does not so monstrous and disgusting an absurdity carry its own infamy and refutation with itself ? . VIII. Page 58. Him, (still from hope to hope the bliss pursuing, Which, from the exhaustless lore of human weal Dawns on the virtuous mind) the thoughts that rise In time-destroying infiniteness, gift, With self-enshrined eternity, &c. Time is our consciousness of the succession of ideas in our mind. Vivid sensation, of either pain or pleasure makes * Upon seeing the Divinity, the Virgin's womb soon swelled, and the unmarried mother was amazed to find herself filled with a mysterious pro- geny, and that she was to bring forth to the world her own Creator. A mortal frame veiled the Framer of the Heavens, and he who embraces the wide-surrounding circle of the world, lay himself concealed in the reoesaea of the womb. 106 NOTES. the time seem long, as the common phrase is, because it renders us more acutely conscious of our ideas. If a mind be conscious of an hundred ideas during one minute by the clock, and of two hundred during another, the latter of the spaces would actually occupy so much greater extent in the mind as two exceed one in quantity. If, therefore, the hu- man mind, by any future improvement of its sensibility, should become conscious of an infinite number of ideas in a minute, that minute would be eternity. I do not hence infer that the actual space between the birth and death of a man will ever be prolonged ; but that his sensibility is perfectible, and that the number of ideas which his mind is capable of receiving is indefinite. One man is stretched on the rack during twelve hours ; another sleeps soundly in his bed : the difference of time perceived by these two persons is immense; one hardly will believe that half an hour has elapsed, the other could credit that centuries had flown during his ago- ny. Thus, the life of a man of virtue and talent, who should die in his thirtieth year, is, with regard to his own feelings, longer than that of a miserable priest-ridden slave, who dreams out a century of dullness. The one has perpetual- ly cultivated his mental faculties, has rendered himself master of his thoughts, can abstract and generalize amid the lethargy of every-day business ; — the other can slumber over the brightest moments of his being, and is unable to remember the happiest hour of his life. Perhaps the pe- rishing ephemeron enjoys a longer life than the tortoise. Dark flood of time ! Roll as listeth thee — I measure not By months or moments thy ambiguous course, : Another may stand by me on the brink And watch the bubble whirled beyond his ken That pauses at my feet. The sense of love, The thirst for action, and the impassioned thought Prolong my being. If I wake no more, My life more actual living will contain Than some grey veterans of the world's cold school. Whose listless hours unprofitably roll, By one enthusiast feeling unredeemed. See Godwin's Pol Jus. vol. i. p. 41 1 ; and Condorcet, Esquisse rf'wn Tableau Historique des Progres de V Esprit humain, Epoque ix. NOTES. 107 VIII. Page 59. No longer now He slays the lamb that looks him in the face. I hold that the depravity of the physicial and moral na- ture of man originated in his unnatural habits of life. The origin of man, like that of the universe, of which he is a part, is enveloped in impenetrable mystery. His generations either had a beginning, or they had not. The weight of evidence in favour of each of these suppositions seems tole- rably equal ; and it is perfectly unimportant to the present argument which is assumed. The language spoken, how- ever, by the mythology of nearly all religions seems to prove, that at some distant period man forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the purity and happiness of his being to unnatural appetites. The date of this event seems to have also been that of some great change in the climates of the earth, with which it has an obvious correspondence. The allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil, and entailing upon their posterity the wrath of God, and the loss of everlasting life, admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet. Milton was so well aware of this, that he makes Raphael thus exhibit to Adam the consequence of his disobedience. Immediately a place Before his eyes appeared : sad, noisome, dark : A lazar-house it seemed ; wherein were laid Numbers of all diseased : all maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone and ulcer, cholic pangs, Daemoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus, and wide-wasting pestilence, Dropsies, and asthmas, and joint racking rheums. And how many thousand more might not be added to this frightful catalogue ! The story of Prometheus is one likewise, which, although universally admitted to be allegorical, has never been satis- factorily explained. Prometheus stole fire from heaven, and 108 NOTES. was chained for this crime to mount Caucasus, where a vul- ture continually devoured his liver, that grew to meet its hunger. Hesiod says that before the time of Prometheus, mankind were exempt from suffering ; that they enjoyed a vigorous youth, and that death, when at length it came, ap- proached like sleep, and gently closed their eyes. Again, so general was this opinion, that Horace, a poet of the Au- gustan age, writes — Thus from the sun's ethereal beam When bold Prometheus stole th' enlivening flame, Of fevers dire a ghastly brood, Till then unknown, th' unhappy fraud pursu'd ; On earth their horrors baleful spread, And the pale monarch of the dead, Till then slow-moving to his prey, Precipitately rapid swept his way. Francis's Horace, Book i. Ode 3. How plain a language is spoken by all this. Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes ; thus inventing an expedient for screening from his disgust the horrors of the shambles. From this moment his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease. It con- sumed his being in every shape of its loathsome and infinite variety, inducing the soul-quelling sinkings of premature and violent death. All vice arose from the ruin of healthful innocence. Tyranny, superstition, commerce, and inequa- lity, were then first known, when reason vainly attempted to guide the wanderings of exacerbated passion. I conclude this part of the subject with an extract from Mr. Newton's Defence of Vegetable Regimen, from whom I have borrow- ed this interpretation of the fable of Prometheus. " Making allowance for such transpositions of the events of the allegory as time might produce after the important truths were forgotten, which this portion of the ancient my- thology was intended to transmit, the drift of the fable seems to be this :— Man at his creation was endowed with the gift of perpetual youth ; that is, he was not formed to be a sickly suffering creature, as we now see hirn, but to enjoy health, and to sink by slow degrees into the bosom of his parent earth, without disease or pain. Prometheus first taught the NOTES. 109 use of animal food (primus bovem occidit Prometheus*) and of fire, with which to render it more digestible and pleasing to the taste. Jupiter, and the rest of the gods, foreseeing the consequences of these inventions,were amus- ed or irritated at the short-sighted devices of the newly- formed creature, and left him to experience the sad effects of them. Thirst, the necessary concomitant of a flesh diet," (perhaps of all diet vitiated by culinary preparation,) " ensued ; water was resorted to, and man forfeited the in- estimable gift of health which he had received from hea- ven : he became diseased, the partaker of a precarious ex- istence, and no longer descended slowly to his grave."* But just disease to luxury succeeds, And every death its own avenger breeds ; r The fury passions from that blood began, And turned on man a fiercer savage — man. Man and the animals whom he has infected with his so- ciety, or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased. The wild hog, the mouflon, the bison, and the wolf, are perfect- ly exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence, or natural old age. But the domestic hog, the sheep, the cow, and the dog, are subject to an incre- dible variety of distempers : and like the corrupters of their nature, have physicians who thrive upon their mise- ries. The supereminenceof man is like Satan's, a super- eminence of pain ; and the majority of his species, doomed to penury, disease^ and crime, have reason to curse the un- toward event, that by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow animals. But the steps that have been taken are irrevocable. The whole of human science is comprised in one question :— How can the advantages of intellect and civilization be re- conciled with the liberty and pure pleasures of natural life ? How can we take the benefits, and reject the evils of the system, which is now interwoven with all the fibres of our being? — I believe that abstinence from animal food and spirituous liquors would in a great measure capacitate us for the solution of this important question. It is true, that mental and bodily derangement is attri- butable in part to other deviations from rectitude and nature * Prometheus first killed an ox. Plin. Nat. Hist. lib. vii. sect 57. t Return to Nature. Cadell, 1811. 10 110 NOTES. than those which concern diet. The mistakes cherished by society respecting the connexion of the sexes, whence the misery and diseases of unsatisfied celibacy, unenjoying prostitution, and the premature arrival of puberty necessa- rily spring ; the putrid atmosphere of crowded cities ; the exhalations of chemical processes : the muffling of our bodies in superfluous apparel ; the absurd treatment of in- fants : — all these, and innumerable other causes, contribute their mite to the mass of human evil. Comparative anatomy teaches us that man resembles fru- giverous animals in every thing,and carnivorous in nothing ; he has neither claws wherewith to seize his prey, nor dis- tinct and pointed teeth to tear the living fibre. A mandarin of the first class, with nails two inches long, would proba- bly find them alone, inefficient to hold even a hare. After every subterfuge of gluttony, the bull must be degraded into the ox, and the ram into the wether, by an unnatural and inhuman operation, that the flaccid fibre may offer a fainter resistance to rebellious nature. It is only by soft- ening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparations, that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion ; and that the sight of its bloody juices and raw horror does not excite intolerable loathing and disgust. Let the advo- cate of animal food force himself to a decisive experiment on its fitness, and, as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth, and plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood ; when fresh from the deed of horror, let him revert to the irresistible instincts of nature that would rise in judgment against it, and say Nature formed me for such work as this. Then, and then only, would he be consistent. Man resembles no carnivorous animal. There is no ex- ception, unless man be one, to the rule of herbiverous ani- mals having cellulated colons. The ourang-outang perfectly resembles man both in the order and number of his teeth. The ourang-outang is the most anthropomorphous of the ape tr,ibe, all of which are strictly frugiverous. There is no other species of animals, which live on different food, in which this analogy exists* In many frugivorous animals, the canine teeth are more pointed and distinct than those of man. The resemblance * Cuvier, Lemons d'Anat. Comp. torn. hi. pages 169, 373, 448, 465, 480. Rees's Cyclopaedia, article Man. NOTES. Ill also of the human stomach to that of the ourang-outang, is greater than to that of any other animal. The intestines are also identical with those of herbivorous animals, which present a large surface for absorption, and have ample and cellulated colons. The ccecum also, though short, is larger than that of carnivorous animals ; and even here the ourang-outang retains its accustomed similarity. The structure of the human frame then is that of one fit- ted to a pure vegetable diet, in every essential particular. It is true, that the reluctance to abstain from animal food, in those who have been long accustomed to its stimulus, is so great in some persons of weak minds, as to be scarcely overcome ; but this is far from bringing any argument in its favour. A lamb which was fed for some time on flesh by a ship's crew, refused its natural diet at the end of the voyage. There are numerous instances of horses, sheep, oxen, and even wood-pigeons, having been taught to live upon flesh, until they have loathed their natural aliment. Young children evidently prefer pastry, oranges, apples, and other fruit, to the flesh of animals, until by the gradual depravation of the digestive organs, the free use of vegeta- bles has for a time produced serious inconveniences '.for a ti7?ie, I say, since there never was an instance wherein a change from spirituous liquors and animal food to vegeta- bles and pure water, has failed ultimately to invigorate the body, by rendering its juices bland and consentaneous, and to restore to the mind that cheerfulness and elasticity, which not one in fifty possesses on the present system. A love of strong liquors is also with difficulty taught to infants. Al- most every one remembers the wry faces which the first glass of port produced. Unsophisticated instinct is invaria- bly unerring ; but to decide on the fitness of animal food, from the perverted appetites which its constrained adoption produces, is to make the criminal a judge in his own cause: it is even worse, it is appealing to the infatuated drunkard in a question of the salubrity of brandy. What is the cause of morbid action in the animal system? Not the air we breathe, for our fellow denizens of nature breathe the same uninjured ; not the water we drink, if re- mote from the pollutions of man and his inventions,* for the * The necessity of resorting to some means of purifying water, and the diseases which arise from its adulteration in civilized countries, is suffi- ciently apparent. See Dr. Lambe's Reports on Cancer. I do not assert that the use of water is in itself unnatural, but that the unperverted palate would swallow no liquid capable of occasioning disease. 112 NOTES. animals drink it too ; not the earth we tread upon : not the unobscured sight of glorious nature, in the wood, the field, or the expanse of sky and ocean ; nothing that we are or do in common with the undiseased inhabitants of the forest. Something then wherein we differ from them ; our habit of altering our food by fire, so that our appetite is no longer a just criterion for the fitness of its gratification. Except in children there remain no traces of that instinct which deter- mines, in all other animals, what aliment is natural or other- wise ; and so perfectly obliterated are they in the reasoning adults of our species, that it has become necessary to urge considerations drawn from compar' Mve anatomy; to prove that we are naturally frugivorous. Crime is madness. Madness is disease. Whenever the cause of disease shall be discovered, the root from which all vice and misery have so long overshadoAved the globe, will lie bare to the axe. All the exertions of man, from that moment, may be considered as tending to the clear profit of his species. No sane mind in a sane body resolves upon a real crime. It is a man of violent passions, bloodshot eyes, and swollen veins, that alone can grasp the knife of murder. The system of a simple diet promises no Utopian advanta- ges. It is no mere reform of legislation, whilst the furious passions and evil propensities of the human heart, in which it had its origin, are still unassuaged. It strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried with success, not alone by nations, but by small societies,families, and even individuals. In no cases has a return to vegetable diet produced the slightest injury ; in most it has been at- tended with changes undeniably beneficial. Should ever a physician be born with the genius of Locke, I am persuad- ed that he might trace all bodily and mental derangements to our unnatural habits, as clearly as that philosopher has traced all knowledge to sensation. What prolific sources of disease are not those mineral and vegetable poisons that have been introduced for its extirpation ! How many thou- sands have become murderers and robbers, bigots and do- mestic tyrants, dissolute and abandoned adventurers, from the use of fermented liquors ; who, had they slaked their thirst only with pure water, would have lived but to diffuse the happiness of their own unperverted feelings. How ma- ny groundless opinions and absurd institutions have not re- ceived a general sanction from the sottishness and intem- perance of individuals ! Who will assert that, had the po- NOTES. 113 pulace of Paris satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature, they would have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription-list of Robespierre? Could a set of men whose passions were not perverted by unnatural stimuli, look with coolness on an auto dafe. Is it to be be- lieved that a being of gentle feelings rising from his meal of roots, would take delight in sports of blood? Was Nero a man of temperate life ? Could you read calm health in his cheek, flushed with ungovernable propensities of hatred for the human race? Did Muley Ismail's pulse beat evenly, was his skin transparent, did his eyes beam with healthful- ness, and its invariable concomitants, cheerfulness and be- nignity ? Though history has decided none of these ques- tions, a child could not hesitate to answer in the negative. Surely the bile-suffused cheek of Buonaparte, his wrinkled brow, and yellow eye, the ceaseless inquietude of his ner- vous system, speak no less plainly the character of his un- resting ambition than his murders and his victories. It is impossible, had Buonaparte descended from a race of vege- table feeders, that he could have had either the inclination or the power to ascend the throne of the Bourbons. The desire of tyranny could scarcely be excited in the indivi- dual, the power to tyrannize would certainly not be dele- gated by a society neither frenzied by inebriation, nor rendered impotent and irrational by disease. Pregnant indeed with inexhaustible calamity is the renunciation of instinct, as it concerns our physical nature ; arithmetic can- not enumerate, nor reason perhaps suspect the multitudi- nous sources of disease in civilized life. Even common water, that apparently innoxious pabulum, when corrupted by the filth of populous cities, is a deadly and insidious de- stroyer.* Who can wonder that all the inducements, held out by God himself in the Bible, to virtue should have been vainer than a nurse's tale ; and that those dogmas, by which he has there excited and justified the most ferocious pro- pensities, should have alone been deemed essential ; whilst Christians are in the daily practice of all those habits which have infected with disease and crime, not only the reprobate sons, but these favoured children of the common Father's love. Omnipotence itself could not save them from the consequences of this original and universal sin. There is no disease, bodily or mental, which adoption of, * Lambe's Reports on Cancer. 10* 114 NOTES. vegetable diet and pure water has not infallibly mitigated, wherever the experiment has been fairly tried. Debility is gradually converted into strength, disease into healthful- ness : madness, in all its hideous variety, from the ravings of the fettered maniac, to the unaccountable irrationalities of ill-temper, that make a hell of domestic life, into a calm and considerate evenness of temper, that alone might offer a certain pledge of the future moral reformation of society. On a natural system of diet, old age would be our last and our only malady : the term of our existence would be pro- tracted ; we should enjoy life, and no longer preclude others from the enjoyment of it : all sensational delights would be infinitely more exquisite and perfect ; the very sense of be- ing would then be a continued pleasure, such as we now feel it in some few and favoured moments of our youth. By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I con- jure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system. Reasoning is surely superfluous on a subject whose merits an experience of six months would set for ever at rest. But it is only among the en- lightened and benevolent that so great a sacrifice of appetite and prejudice can be expected, even though its ultimate excellence should not admit of dispute. It is found easier by the short-sighted victims of disease, to palliate their torments, by medicine, than to prevent them by regimen. The vulgar of all ranks are invariably sensual and indocile ; yet I cannot but feel myself persuaded, that when the bene- fits of vegetable diet are mathematically proved : when it is as clear, that those who live naturally are exempt from premature death, as that nine is not one, the most sottish of mankind will feel a preference towards a long and tranquil, contrasted with a short and painful life. On the average, out of sixty persons, four die in three years. Hopes are enter- tained, that in April 1814, a statement will be given that sixty persons, all having lived more than three years on vegetables and pure water, are then in perfect health. More than two years has now elapsed ; not one of them has died ; no such example will be found in any sixty persons taken at random. Seventeen persons of all ages (the fa- milies of Dr. Lambe and Mr. Newton) have lived for seven years on this diet without a death, and almost without the slightest illness. Surely, when we consider that some of these were infants, and one a martyr to asthma, now near- ly subdued, we may challenge any seventeen persons taken NOTES. 115 at random in this city to exhibit a parallel case. Those who may have been excited to question the rectitude of es- tablished habits of diet, by these loose remarks, should con- sult Mr. Newton's luminous and eloquent essay.* When these proofs come fairly before the world, and are clearly seen by all who understand arithmetic, it is scarcely possible that abstinence from aliments demonstrably perni- cious should not become universal. In proportion to the number of proselytes, so will be the weight of evidence ; and when a thousand persons can be produced, living on vegetables and distilled water, who have to dread no disease but old age, the world will be com- pelled to regard animal flesh and fermented liquors as slow but certain poisons. The change which would be produ- ced by simpler habits on political economy, is sufficiently remarkable. The monopolizing eater of animal flesh would no longer destroy his constitution by devouring an acre at a meal, and many loaves of bread would cease to contri- bute to gout, madness, and apoplexy, in the shape of a pint of porter, or a dram of gin, when appeasing the long-pro- tracted famine of the hard-working peasant's hungry babes. The quantity of nutritious vegetable matter, consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance, undepraving indeed, and incapable of genera- ting disease, if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth. The most fertile districts of the habitable globe are now actually cultivated by men for animals at a delay and waste of aliment absolutely incapable of calculation. It is only the wealthy that can, to any great degree, even now, indulge the unnatural craving for dead flesh, and they pay for the greater license of the privilege, by subjection to supernumerary diseases. Again, the spirit of the nation that should take the lead in this great reform would insen- sibly become agricultural : commerce, with all its vice, self- ishness, and corruption, would gradually decline ; more natural habits would produce gentler manners, and the ex- cessive complication of political relations would be so far simplified that every individual might feel and understand why he loved his country, and took a personal interest in its welfare. How Would England, for example, depend on the caprices of foreign rulers, if she contained within her- self all the necessaries, and despised whatever they possess- * Return to Nature, or Defence of Vegetable Regimen. Cadell, 1811. 116 NOTES. ed of the luxuries of life 1 How could they starve her into compliance with their views ? Of what consequence would it be that they refused to take her woollen manufactures, when large and fertile tracts of the island ceased to be al- lotted to the waste of pasturage ? On a natural system of diet, we should require no spices from India ; no wines from Portugal, Spain, France, or Madeira ; none of those multi- tudinous articies of luxury, for which every corner of the globe is rifled, and which are the causes of so much indivi- dual rivalship, such calamitous and sanguinary national dis- putes. In the history of modern times, the avarice of com- mercial monopoly, no less than the ambition of weak and wicked chiefs, seems to have fomented the universal discord, to have added stubbornness to the mistakes of cabinets, and indocility to the infatuation of the people. Let it ever be remembered, that it is the direct influence of commerce to make the interval between the richest and the poorest man, wider and more unconquerable. Let it be remembered, that it is a foe to every thing of real worth and excellence in the human character. The odious and disgusting aristocracy of wealth, is built upon the ruins of all that is good in chi- valry or republicanism ; and luxury is the forerunner of a barbarism scarce capable of cure. Is it impossible to real- ize a state of society, where all the energies of man shall be directed to the production of his solid happiness ? Certainly, if this advantage (the object of all political speculation) be in any degree attainable, it is attainable only by a commu- nity, which holds out no factitious incentives to the avarice and ambition of the few, and which is internally organized for the liberty, security, and comfort of the many. None must be entrusted with power (and money is the completest species of power) who do not stand pledged to use it ex- clusively for the general benefit. But the use of animal flesh and fermented liquors, directly militates with this equality of the rights of man. The peasant cannot gratify these fashion- able cravings without leaving his family to starve. Without disease and war, those sweeping curtailers of population, pasturage would include a waste too great to be afforded. The labour requisite to support a family is far lighter* than * It has come under the author's experience, that some of the workmen on an embankment in North Wales who, in consequence of the inability of the proprietor to pay them, seldom received their wages, have supported large families by cultivating small spots of sterile ground by moonlight. In the notes to Pratt's poem, " Bread or the Poor," is an account of an in- NOTES. 117 is usually supposed. The peasantry work, not only for themselves, but for the aristocracy, the army, and the manu- facturers. The advantage of a reform in diet is obviously greater than that of any other. It strikes at the root of the evil. To remedy the abuses of legislation, before we annihilate the propensities by which they are produced, is to suppose, that by taking away the effect, the cause will cease to ope- rate. But the efficacy of this system depends entirely on the proselytism of individuals, and grounds its merits, as a benefit to the community, upon the total change of the die- tetic habits in its members. It proceeds securely from a number of particular cases to one that is universal, and has this advantage over the contrary mode, that one error does not invalidate all that has gone before. Let not too much, however, be expected from this system. The healthiest among us is not exempt from hereditary disease. The most symmetrical, athletic, and long-lived is a being inexpressiby inferior to what he would have been had not the unnatural habits of his ancestors accumulated for him a certain portion of malady and deformity. In the most perfect specimen of civilized man, something is still found wanting by the physiological critic. Can a return to nature, then, instantaneously eradicate predispositions that have been slowly taking root in the silence of innume- rable ages ? — Indubitably not. All that I contend for is, that from the moment of the relinquishing all unnatural habits, no new disease is generated ; and that the predisposition to hereditary maladies gradually perishes for want of its ac- customed supply. In cases of consumption, cancer, gout, asthma, and scrofula, such is the invariable tendency of a diet of vegetables and pure water. Those who may be induced by these remarks to give the vegetable system a fair trial, should in the first place, date the commencement of their practice, from the moment of their conviction. All depends upon breaking through a pernicious habit resolutely, and at once. Dr. Trotterf as- serts, that no drunkard Avas ever reformed by gradually re- linquishing his dram. Animal flesh in its effects on the human stomach, is analogous to a dram. It is similar to the dustrious labourer, who, by working in a small garden, before and after his day's task, attained to an enviable state of independence, * See Trotter on the Nervous Temperament, 118 NOTES. kind, though differing in the degree, of its operation. The proselyte to a pure diet, must be warned to expect a tem- porary diminution of muscular strength. The subtraction of a powerful stimulus will suffice to account for this event. But it is only temporary, and is succeeded by an equable ca- pability for exertion, far surpassing his former various and fluctuating strength. Above all, he will acquire an easiness of breathing, by which such exertion is performed, with a re- markable exemption from that painful and difficult panting now felt by almost every one, after hastily climbing an or- dinary mountain. He will be equally capable of bodily exertion or mental application, after as before his simple meal. He will feel none of the narcotic effects of ordinary diet. Irritability, the direct consequence of exhausting sti- muli, would yield to the power of natural and tranquil im- pulses. He will no longer pine under the lethargy of e/i- nui, that unconquerable weariness of life, more to be dread- ed than death itself. He will escape the epidemic madness which broods over its own injurious notions of the Deity, and " realizes the hell that priests and beldams feign." Eve- ry man forms as it were his god from his own character ; to the divinity of one of simple habits, no offering would be more acceptable than the happiness of his creatures. He would be incapable of hating or persecuting others for the love of God. He will find, moreover, a system of simple diet to be a system of perfect epicurism. He will no longer be incessantly occupied in blunting and destroying those organs from which he expects his gratification. The plea- sures of taste to be derived from a dinner of potatoes, beans, peas, turnips, lettuces, with a dessert of apples, gooseber- ries, strawberries, currants, raspberries, and, in winter, oranges, apples, and pears, is far greater than is supposed. Those who wait until they can eat this plain fare with the sauce of appetite will scarcely join with the hypocritical sensualist at a lord mayor's feast, who declaims against the s pleasures of the table. Solomon kept a thousand concu- bines, and owned in despair that all was vanity. .{ The man whose happiness is constituted by the society of one amia- ble woman, would find some difficulty in sympathizing with the disappointment of this venerable debauchee. 3 I address myself not only to the young enthusiast, the ardent devotee of truth and virtue, the pure and passionate moralist, yet unvitiated by the contagion of the world. He will embrace a pure system, from its abstract truth, its beau- !rW>^ X/V-C/> $UA (k^JnUUfr v« I 1 C\ s* NOTES. 119 ty, its simplicity, and its promise of wide-extended benefit : unless custom has turned poison into food, he will hate the brutal pleasures of the chase by instinct ; it will be a con- templation full of horror and disappointment to his mind, that beings capable of the gentlest and most admirable sym- pathies, should take delight in the death-pangs and last con- vulsions of dying animals. The elderly man, whose youth has been poisoned by intemperance, or who has lived with apparent moderation, and is afflicted with a variety of pain- ful maladies, would find his account in a beneficial change, produced without the risk of poisonous medicines. The mother, to whom the perpetual restlessness of disease, and unaccountable deaths incident to her children, are the cau- ses of incurable unhappiness, would on this diet experience the satisfaction of beholding their perpetual health and na- tural playfulness * The most valuable lives are daily destroyed by diseases, that it is dangerous to palliate and impossible to cure by medicine. How much longer will man continue to pimp for the gluttony of death, his most insidious, implacable, and eternal foe ? " You apply the term wild to lions, panthers, and ser- pents, yet in your own savage slaughters, you far surpass them in ferocity, for the blood shed by them is a matter of necessity, and requisite for their subsistence. ********** " That man is not by nature destined to devour animal food, is evident from the construction of the human frame, which bears no resemblance to wild beasts or birds of prey. Man is not provided with claws or talons, with sharpness of fang or tusk, so well adapted to tear and lacerate ; nor is his stomach so well braced and muscular, nor his animal spi- rits so warm as to enable him to digest this solid mass of * See Mr. Newton's book. His children are the most beautiful and healthy creatures it is possible to conceive ; the girls are perfect models for a sculptor ; their dispositions are also the most gentle and conciliating; the judicious treatment which they experience in other points, may be a co-relative cause of this. In the first five years of their life, of 18,000 children that are born, 7.500 die of various diseases, and how many more of those that survive are not rendered miserable by maladies not imme- diately mortal ? The quality and quantity of a woman's milk are mate- rially injured by the use of dead flesh. In an island, near Iceland, where no vegetables are to be got, the children invariably die of tetanus, before they are three weeks old, and the population is supplied from the main land. — Sir G. Mackenzie's Hist, of Iceland. See also Emile, chap. i. p. 53, 54,56. 120 NOTES. animal flesh. On the contrary, nature has made his teeth smooth, his mouth narrow, and his tongue soft ; and has contrived by the slowness of his digestion, to divert him from devouring a species of food so ill adapted to his frame and constitution. But if you still maintain, that such is your natural mode of subsistence, then follow nature in your mode of killing your prey, and employ neither knife, hammer, or hatchet, but like wolves, bears, and lions, seize an ox with your teeth, grasp a boar round the body, or tear asunder a lamb or a hare, and like the savage tribe, devour them still panting in the agonies of death. " We carry our luxury still farther by the variety of sau- ces aud seasonings which we add to our beastly banquets, mixing together oil, wine, honey, pickles, vinegar, and Sy- rian and Arabian ointments and perfumes, as if we intend- ed to bury and embalm the carcases on which we feed. The difficulty of digesting such a mass of matter reduced in our stomachs to a state of liquefaction and putrefaction, is the source of endless disorders in the human frame. " First of all, the wild mischievous animals were select- ed for food, and then the birds and fishes were dragged to slaughter ; next the human appetite directed itself against the laborious ox, the useful and fleece-bearing sheep, and the cock, the guardian of the house. At last by this prepa- ratory discipline, man became matured for human massa- cres, slaughters and wars." Plautus. THE END.