LETTER XXII. RELIGIOUS SENTIMENTS.

The philosophy of happiness must find its ultimate requisite in the hopes of religion. Man must be persuaded that his present life has relation to a never ending future, and that an eternal providence watches over the universe, before he will abandon himself with a tranquil confidence to those irresistible laws by which he is borne along. He then marches towards the future, as he would confidently follow a guide of tried prudence and fidelity in a dark path.[54]

In the fever and tumult of worldly pleasures and pursuits, the voice of wisdom has little chance to be heard, and it seems necessary that misfortune should have forced the mind in upon itself, before we become inclined to find resources in religion. Then we invoke this sublime and consoling power, and like the friend that avoids our prosperity and our festivals, but returns to cheer our[155] misfortunes, this celestial friend is at hand to offer her sustaining succor. We may class all those pleasures as noxious, which will not associate with this august visitant. Even in our periods of happiness, if we pause for the reflection of a moment, we find the need of immortality. All the generous and tender affections acquire a new charm in alliance with religious ideas, in the same manner as objects beautiful in themselves, receive a new lustre when a pure light is thrown upon them. Filial piety becomes more touching in those children who pray with fervor for the preservation of the life of a mother. Let a pious courage guide the sister of charity, and she becomes the angel of consolation, as she visits the abodes of misery. Even virtue itself does not receive its celestial impress, except in alliance with religious sentiments. A few of the higher philosophers among the great ancients, and Fenelon, Newton, Milton and a few other men of immortal name, saw the divinity as He is, and contemplated the perfect model of his infinite perfections. Their efforts tended to co?perate with the divine views of order and harmony, in constantly directing human actions and thoughts towards good. The beautiful system of the gospel has the same simplicity of object; and its tendency to honor and meliorate humanity is directed by the highest wisdom. Sentiments which give to all our faculties a direction, fertilize genius as well as virtue. High models, in any walk of mind, will never be produced in a world whose inhabitants believe in nothing but matter, fortuitous combinations, and the annihilation of our being. Apostles of atheism! your dreary creed throws an impenetrable gloom upon the universe, and dries the source of all high thoughts. The advocates of[156] these views vaunt the necessity of proclaiming the truth. I, too, am the fearless advocate of the truth, and have no dread of its results. But could I be persuaded, that religious hopes were unfounded, I should be tempted to renounce my confidence in truth itself; and no longer to inculcate the necessity of loving and seeking to propagate it. It is by the light of this divine torch, that real sages have desired to investigate religion. Were it possible that the elevated and consoling ideas, which religion offers, could be baseless and absurd chimeras, error and truth would be so confounded, that there would no longer remain any discriminating sign by which to distinguish the one from the other. Atheists boast that they are the only frank and hardy antagonists of superstition. They are its most effectual allies. The superstitious have brought forth the atheists, and the atheists have re-produced the superstitious; as, in revolutions, resistance produces fury, and that multiplies resistance.

I have known excellent men, apparently earnest and docile inquirers for truth, who have desired in vain to establish in their mind these consoling convictions.—Their understanding refused to respond to the wish of their hearts.

Why can I not impart this happy conviction to their understanding? My subject precludes reasoning, and I only know arguments that are very simple; but I think with Bacon, that it needs quite as much credulity to adopt the opinion of atheists, as to yield faith to all the reveries of the Talmud or the Koran. The more profoundly I attempt to investigate the doctrines of infidelity, and consider everything that surrounds me, as resulting from the combinations of chance, the play of[157] atoms, the efforts of brute matter, the more my inquiries are involved in darkness. I strive in vain to give to any hypothesis of atheism the honest semblance of probability. Matter cannot reflect upon the order which its different parts require. Neither can those parts interchange reason and discussion. Neither an atom, nor a globe can say to others of their class, ‘such are the courses in which we must move.’ Let us simplify difficulties, as much as possible, and admit that matter has always existed; let us even suppose motion essential to it; a supreme intelligence is none the less necessary to the harmony of the universe. Without a governor of worlds, I can only conceive of nihility or chaos.

From the sublimest of all thoughts, there is a God, flow all the truths which my heart desires. The beautiful superstructure of Christianity results, as a corollary, or ultimate inference, from this consoling axiom. The system which rejects the soul’s immortality, is equally absurd with that of atheism. Of the different arguments against the being of a God, the most striking one is that which is drawn from the evils which prevail on the earth. The first thought of every man of sensibility, is, that had he the power to make a world, he would banish misery from it, and so arrange the order of things, as that existence should be, to all conscious beings, a succession of moments, each marked by happiness. But infirmities, vices, misery, sorrow and death pursue us. How reconcile the misery of the creation with the power and beneficence of the Creator? How resolve this strange problem? How explain this revolting contradiction? Immortality is the only solution of the enigma of life.[55]

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A whimsical combination of deism and materialism forms, at present, the most widely diffused system among the unbelieving. They have imagined a God possessing only physical power, and contemplating the movement of his innumerable worlds, alike indifferent to crime and virtue. He beholds with the same carelessness the generations that pass, and those that succeed; and sees deliverers and tyrants alike confounded in their fall.—Admit the truth of such dogmas, and the conceptions of a religious man would possess more expansion and sublimity than the views of the Eternal. Socrates, without the illumination of the gospel, could have taught them better. Surrounded by his weeping disciples, he points them beyond the tomb to the places where the sage at last respires freely; and where the misfortunes and inequalities of earth are redressed. In painting these illusions of hope, if they are vain, the sage has conceived in his dreams an equity superior to that of the infinite Being. Let us dare to maintain that the feeble children of clay have a right to entertain ideas of order and desert, more just than those of the Creator, or admit that the heart, made capable of the desire of another life, is destined to enjoy it.

The destiny of all the inferior orders that surround us, appears to terminate upon the earth. Ours alone is evidently not accomplished here. The animals, exempt from vice, incapable of virtue, experience, in ceasing to live, neither hopes nor regrets. They die without the foresight of death. Man, in the course of an agitated life, degrades himself by follies and vices, or honors himself by generous and useful actions. Remembrances, loves, ties, in countless forms, twine about his heart. He[159] is torn, in agony, from beings for whom he has commenced an affection that he feels might be eternal. Persecuted for his virtue, proscribed for his wisdom and courage, calumniated for his most conscientious acts, he turns to heaven a fixed look of confidence and hope. Has he nothing to perform beyond death? Has the author of nature forgotten his justice, only in completing his most perfect work?

Our immortality is a necessary consequence of the existence of God. Let us not wander astray in vain discussions, which, with our present faculties, we can never master—such as relate to the nature of the soul. My hopes, my convictions, rest not upon a cloudy, metaphysical argument. Neither can the proud treatise of a sophist weaken, nor the puerile dialectics of a pedant increase it. It is enough for me that there is a God. Virtue in misfortune must have hopes which do not terminate with the tomb. The sublime inculcation of Socrates was, ‘preserve confidence in death.’ But recompense in another existence supposes merit; and merit requires liberty.

Is man free? We can reduce this question which has been so much vexed, and so often obscured, to terms of entire simplicity. It has been most forcibly presented by Hobbes, the vile apostle at once of atheism and despotism, who seems to have striven to unite the most pernicious doctrines with an example, which merits execration. ‘Two objects,’ he remarks, ‘attract us in opposite directions. As long as they produce impressions nearly equal, our mind, in a state of uncertainty, vacillates from the one to the other; and we believe, that we are deliberating. Finally, one of the objects strikes us with[160] a stronger impression than the other. We are drawn towards it; and we believe that it is because we will it.—Thus, man, always passive, yields to the strongest and most vivid sensation. Free actions would be an effect without a cause.’ Admirable reasoning! What other freedom could I wish, than to prefer what seems to me the most desirable? Let the disciples of Hobbes instruct me how they would choose that man should determine, in order to be conscious of liberty? Would they wish him to choose the object that is repugnant to him? This is too evidently absurd. Should he vacillate in indifference between the one object and the other? This would be to sink into an existence of perfect apathy, without reason or will. Man has all the liberty, of which such a being is capable—all, in fact, which he could desire.

How puerile are these metaphysical subtleties, when employed upon moral truths![56] What a monster would man become on the system of the fatalists! What is that system worth, the consequences of which cannot be admitted? If we act under the inevitable empire of fatalism, why is he who proclaims this doctrine, indignant at the thought of crime? Does he contemplate Socrates and his executioners with the same approbation?—Will he regard with the same feeling Antoninus dictating pious lessons to his son, and Nero assassinating his mother? Will he estimate as alike meritorious a persecuted Christian praying for his enemies, and the monarch ordering the massacre of St Bartholomew? Do such contrasts offend us? And why? According to the system of fatalism, the good ought to inspire us with less interest than the wicked. A blind fatality awards to the[161] virtuous that pure pleasure, that is inseparably connected with good actions. They receive a high reward without any merit; while the others are a prey to remorse, and the incessant object of public hatred and abhorrence. If they are innocent, as on the principles of fatalism they must be, how ought we to mourn over them, and pity them! What purpose can these doctrines serve? He who advocates them, is conscious of impulses to do good, and deliberates upon alternatives in the courses which honor and duty call him to pursue. His principles, then, are contradicted by the voice of his own heart. When he has committed a fault, it declares to him that he might have chosen a contrary part.—When he has done a virtuous action, it inspires emotions of joy, which render him conscious that he is a free agent. This voice within is anterior to all reasoning, and as incapable of being invalidated as any other consciousness. Inexhaustible emotions of satisfaction spring from religious hopes. Reanimated by them, I no longer see tears without consolation, nor fear an eternal adieu.—The tomb, though a fearful, is but a frail barrier, which separates us from those real joys, of which the pleasures of a fugitive existence are but the shadow.

Never would men have exchanged their natural convictions, their internal aspirations, their instinctive hopes of immortality, for the lurid and deceptive glare of infidelity, if religious views had not been disfigured by being combined with the grossest errors and prejudices. Of these, there are two which every good man ought to strive to eradicate from all minds, and if it were possible, to purge from the earth.

The first causes us to behold in the divinity a menacing[162] and implacable judge, constantly eager to execute vengeance. Monstrous conception! Revolting error! Infancy and old age, the two extremes of earthly existence, which from their feebleness, call for our most soothing cares, are those most persecuted with this vile and fierce prejudice. A cruel superstition has selected these terrific ideas, these horrible images, with which to besiege the bed of death, to light up the scene of agony—of parting and trembling apprehensions—with the flames of perdition. My bosom swells with mingled emotions, when I see any one attempting to darken the feeble and docile reason of a child with these sinister views. Pursued even in his dreams by these terrible menaces, before he knows the meaning of crime, he has already felt its torments. Astonishing infatuation! It is in this aspect that gloomy religionists have presented the compassionate and sustaining hope of the gospel. Instead of inspiring sweet and consoling ideas, they have succeeded in filling innocence with remorse.

The other prejudice is intolerance, or that spirit which causes us to view all persons guilty, whose faith is different from ours. While religion enjoins it upon us to cover the faults of our kind with a veil of indulgence, intolerance teaches us to transform their opinions into crimes. Religion rears asylums for the unfortunate.—Intolerance prepares scaffolds for all whom she chooses to denominate heretics. The one invokes ministers of charity, and the other, executioners. The one wipes away tears, and the other sheds blood.

Intolerance without power is simply ridiculous; but becomes most odious when armed with authority. The cry of humanity is ‘Peace with all men.’ If any were[163] excepted, it should be the intolerant. Even they merit no severer punishment, than the inflictions of their own fury. They may attain to deliverance from remorse in their confident delirium, and may count their crimes as virtues, through the influence of self-blindness. But this strange obliquity of the understanding, this horrible intoxication, repels happiness. Joy and peace must fly the soul, of which this spirit has taken possession.

In another life, the measure of our felicity in the mansions of the just, will be the happiness we have created for the beings around us in this fleeting existence. A religious man constantly strives to render this, our terrestrial sojourn, more like the abode towards which his thoughts are elevated. His constant occupation is to mitigate suffering, banish prejudice and hatred, and calm the fury of party. All his relations are those of peace and love. Intolerant men! Who, of your number, will hope to hear it said of him in the retribution of the just, ‘much has been forgiven him, because he has loved much?’