Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

following is a close translation of this famous frag

ment:

[ocr errors]

Thinkest thou, O Niceratus, that those departed spirits, who are satiated with the luxuries of life, shall escape as from an oblivious God? the eye of justice is wakeful and all-seeing; and we may truly pronounce that there are two several roads conducting us to the grave; one proper to the just, the other to the unjust; for if just and unjust fare alike, and the grave shall cover both to all eternity-Hence ! get thee hence at once! destroy, lay waste, defraud, confound at pleasure! but deceive not thyself; there is a judgment after death, which God, the lord of all things, will exact, whose tremendous name is not to be uttered by my lips, and he it is who limits the appointed date of the transgressor.'

It is curious to discover sentiments of this venerable sort in the fragment of a Greek comedy, yet certain it is, that it has either Philemon or Diphilus for its author, both writers of the New Comedy and contemporaries. Justin Clemens and Eusebius have all quoted it, the former from Philemon, both the latter from Diphilus: Grotius and Le Clerc follow the authority of Justin, and insert it in their collection of Philemon's fragments: Hertelius, upon the joint authorities of Clemens and Eusebius, gives it to Diphilus, and publishes it as such in his valuable and rare remains of the Greek comic writers. I conceive there are now no data, upon which criticism can decide for either of these two claimants, and the honour must accordingly remain suspended

between them.

Sentences of this sort are certainly very precious relics, and their preservation is owing to a happy custom which the Greeks had of marking the margins of their books, opposite to any passage which particularly struck them, and this mark was gene

rally x, the initial xonorov (useful), and the collection afterward made of these distinguished passages they called χρηστομάθειαν.

It would be a curious and amusing collection of moral and religious sentences, extracted from heathen writers, with corresponding texts selected from the Holy Scriptures: Grotius hath done something towards it in his preface to the Collectanea of Stobæus; but the quotations already given will suffice to shew, in a general point of view, what had been the advances of human reason, before God enlightened the world by his special revelation.

NUMBER LXIII.

Ir the deist, who contends for the all-sufficiency of natural religion, shall think that in these passages, which I have quoted in the preceding number, he has discovered fresh resources on the part of human reason as opposed to divine revelation, he will find himself involved in a very false conclusion. Though it were in my power to have collected every moral and religious sentence, which has fallen from the pens of the heathen writers antecedent to Christianity, and although it should thereby appear that the morality of the gospel had been the morality of right reason in all ages of the world, he would still remain as much unfurnished as ever for establishing his favourite position, that the Scriptures reveal nothing more than man's understanding had discovered without their aid. We may therefore console ourselves without scruple, in discovering that the heathen world was not immersed in total darkness, and

the candid mind, however interested for Christianity, may be gratified with the reflection that the human understanding was not so wholly enslaved, but that in certain instances it could surmount the prejudices of system, and, casting off the shackles of idolatry, argue up to that supreme of all things, which the historian Tacitus emphatically defines, summum illud et æternum, neque mutabile, neque interiturum.

Now when the mind is settled in the proof of One Supreme Being, there are two several modes of reasoning, by which natural religion may deduce the probability of a future state: one of these results from an examination of the human soul, the other from reflecting on the unequal distribution of happiness in the present life.

Every man who is capable of examining his own faculties, must discern a certain power within him, which is neither coeval with, nor dependent upon his body and its members; I mean that power of reflection, which we universally agree to seat in the soul: it is not coeval with the body, because we were not in the use and exercise of it, when we were infants; it is not dependent on it, because it is not subject to the changes which the body undergoes in its passage from the womb to the grave; for instance, it is not destroyed, or even impaired, by amputation of the limbs or members, it does not evaporate by the continual flux and exhalation of the corporeal humours, is not disturbed by motion of the limbs, nor deprived of its powers by their inaction; it is not necessarily involved in the sickness and infirmity of the body, for whilst that is decaying and dissolving away by an incurable disease, the intellectual faculties shall in many cases remain perfect and unimpaired: why, then, should it be supposed the soul of a man is to die with his body, and accompany it into the oblivious grave, when it did

not make its entrance with it into life, nor partook of its decay, its fluctuations, changes, and casualties?

If these obvious reflections upon the nature and properties of the soul, lead to the persuasion of a future state, the same train of reasoning will naturally discover that the condition of the soul in that future state must be determined by the merits or demerits of its antecedent life. It has never been the notion of heathen or of deist, that both the good and the evil shall enter upon equal and undistinguished felicity or punishment: no reasoning man could ever conceive that the soul of Nero and the soul of Antoninus in a future state partook of the same common lot and thus it follows upon the evidence of reason, that the soul of man shall be rewarded or punished hereafter, according to his good or evil conduct here; and this consequence is the more obvious, because it does not appear in the moral government of the world, that any such just and regular distribution of rewards and punishments obtains on this side the grave; a circumstance no otherwise to be reconciled to our suitable conceptions of divine justice, than by referring things to the final decision of a judgment to come.

Though all these discoveries are open to reason, let no man conclude that what the reason of a few discovered, were either communicated to, or acknowledged by all: No, the world was dark and grossly ignorant, some indeed have argued well and clearly; others confusedly, and the bulk of mankind not at all: the being of a God, and the unity of that Supreme Being, struck conviction to the hearts of those, who employed their reason coolly and dispassionately in such sublime inquiries; but where was the multitude meanwhile? Bewildered with a mob of deities, whom their own fables had endowed with human attributes, passions, and infirmities; whom

their own superstition had deified and enrolled amongst the immortals, till the sacred history of Olympus became no less impure than the journals of a brothel many there were, no doubt, who saw the monstrous absurdity of such a system, yet not every one who discerned error, could discover truth: the immortality of the soul, a doctrine so harmonious to man's nature, was decried by system, and opposed by subtilty; the question of a future state was hung up in doubt, or bandied between conflicting disputants through all the quirks and evasions of sophistry and logic philosophy, so called, was split into a variety of sects, and the hypothesis of each enthusiastic founder became the standing creed of his school, which it was an inviolable point of honour never to desert. In this confusion of systéms men chose for themselves, not according to conviction, but by the impulse of passion, or from motives of convenience: the voluptuary was interested to dismiss the gods to their repose, that his might not be interrupted by them; and all who wished to have their range of sensuality in this world, without fear or control, readily enlisted under the banners of Epicurus till his followers out-numbered all the rest! this was the court-creed under the worst of the Roman emperors, and the whole body of the nation, with few exceptions, adopted it; for what could be more natural, than for the desperate to bury conscience in the grave of atheism, or rush into annihilation by the point of the poniard, when they were weary of existence, and discarded by fortune? With some it was the standard principle of their sect to doubt, with others to argue every thing; and when we recollect that Cicero himself was of the New Academy, we have a clue to unravel all the seeming contradicticas of his moral and metaphysical sentiments, amidst the confusion of which we are never

« AnkstesnisTęsti »