CHAP. XIX. HAPPY DEATHS. FEW circumstances contribute more fatally to confirm in worldly men that insensibility to eternal things which was considered in the preceding chapter, than the boastful accounts we sometimes hear of the firm and heroic death-beds of popular but irreligious characters. Many causes contribute to these happy deaths as they are called. The blind are bold, they do not see the precipice they despise.-Or perhaps there is less unwillingness to quit a world which has so often disappointed them, or which they have sucked to the last dregs. They leave life with less reluctance, feeling that they have exhausted all its gratifications. Or it is a disbelief of the reality of the state on which they are about to enter.—Or it is a desire to be released from excessive pain, a desire naturally felt by those who calculate their gain, rather by what they are escaping from, than by what they are to receive. Or it is equability of temper, or firmness of nerve, or hardness of mind.— Or it is the arrogant wish to make the last act of life confirm its preceding professions.-Or it is the vanity of perpetuating their philosophic character.Or if some faint ray of light break in, it is the pride of not retracting the sentiments which from pride they have maintained:-The desire of posthumous renown among their own party; the hope to make their disciples stand firm by their example; the ambition to give their last possible blow to revelationor perhaps the fear of expressing doubts which might beget a suspicion that their disbelief was not so sturdy as they would have it thought. Above all, may they not, as a punishment for their long neglect of the warning voice of truth, be given up to a strong delusion to believe the lie they have so often propagated, and really to expect to find in death that eternal sleep, with which they have affected to quiet. their own consciences, and have really weakened the faith of others? Every new instance is an additional buttress on which the sceptical school lean for support, and which they produce as a fresh triumph. With equal satisfaction they collect stories of infirmity, depression, and want of courage in the dying hour of religious men, whom the nature of the disease, timorousness of spirit, profound humility, the sad remembrance of sin, though long repented of and forgiven, a deep sense of the awfulness of meeting God in judgment;-whom some or all of these causes may occasion to depart in trembling fear; in whom, though heaviness may endure through the night of death, yet joy cometh in the morning of the resurrection. It is a maxim of the civil law that definitions are hazardous. And it cannot be denied that various descriptions of persons have hazarded much in their definitions of a happy death. A very able and justly admired writer, who has distinguished himself by the most valuable works on political economy, has recorded, as proofs of the happy death of a no less celebrated contemporary, that he cheerfully amused himself in his last hours with Lucian, a game of whist, and some good humoured drollery upon Charon and his boat. But may we not venture to say, with 'one of the people called Christians,'* himself a wit and philosopher, though of the school of Christ, that the man who could meet death in such a frame of mind, 'might smile over Babylon in ruins, esteem the earthquake which destroyed Lisbon an agreeable occurrence, and congratulate the hardened Pharoah on his overthrow in the Red Sea.' This eminent historian and philosopher, whose great intellectual powers it is as impossible not to admire, as not to lament their unhappy misapplication, has been eulogized by his friend, as coming nearer than almost any other man, to the perfection of human nature in his life; and has been almost deified for the cool courage and heroic firmness with which he met death. His eloquent panegyrist, with as insidious an inuendo as has ever been thrown out against revealed religion, goes on to observe, that 'perhaps it is one of the very worst circumstances against Christianity, that very few of its professors were ever either so moral, so humane, or could so philosophically govern their passions, as the sceptical David Hume.' Yet notwithstanding this rich embalming of so noble a compound of 'matter and motion,' we must be permitted to doubt one of the two things presented for our admiration; we must either doubt the so much boasted happiness of his death, or the so much extolled humanity of his heart. We must be permitted to suspect the soundness of that benevolence, which led him to devote his latest hours to prepare, under the label of an Essay on Suicide, a potion for * The late excellent bishop Horne. See his letters to Dr. Adam Smith. posterity, of so deleterious a quality, that if taken by the patient, under all the circumstances in which he undertakes to prove it innocent, might have gone near to effect the extinction of the whole human race. For if all rational beings, according to this posthumous prescription, are at liberty to procure their own release from life, 'under pain or sickness, shame or poverty,' how large a portion of the world would be authorized to quit it uncalled! For how many are subject to the two latter grievances; from the two former how few are altogether exempt!* The energy of that ambition which could concentrate the last efforts of a powerful mind, the last exertions of a spirit greedy of fame, into a project not only for destroying the souls, but for abridging the lives of his fellow creatures, leaves at a disgraceful distance the inverted thirst of glory of the man, who to immortalize his own name, set fire to the Temple at Ephesus. Such a burning zeal to annihilate the eternal hope of his fellow creatures might be philosophy; but surely to authorize them to curtail their moral existence, which to the infidel who looks for no other, must be invaluable, was not philanthropy. But if this death was thought worthy of being blazoned to the public eye in all the warm and glowing colours with which affection decorates pa * Another part of the Essay on Suicide has this passage,Whenever pain or sorrow so far overcome my patience, as to make me tired of life, I may conclude that I am recalled from my station in the plainest and most express terms.'--And again -When I fall upon my own sword, I receive my death equally from the hands of the Deity, as if it had proceeded from a lion, a precipice, or a fever.'—And again-Where is the crime of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural channel?" negyric; the disciples of the same school have been in general, anxiously solicitous to produce only the more creditable instances of invincible hardness of heart, while they have laboured to cast an impenetrable veil over the closing scene of those among the less inflexible of the fraternity, who have exhibited in their departing moments, any symptoms of doubt, any indications of distrust, respecting the validity of their principles:-Principles which they had long maintained with so much zeal, and disseminated with so much industry. In spite of the sedulous anxiety of his satellites to conceal the clouded setting of the great luminary of modern infidelity, from which so many minor stars have filled their little urns, and then set up for original lights themselves; in spite of the pains taken -for we must drop metaphor-to shroud from all eyes, except those of the initiated, the terror and dismay with which the Philosopher of Geneva met death, met his summons to appear before that God whose providence he had ridiculed, that Saviour whose character and offices he had vilified,-the secret was betrayed. In spite of the precautions taken by his associates to bury in congenial darkness the agonies which in his last hours contradicted the audacious blasphemies of a laborious life spent in their propagation, at last, like his great instigator, he believed and trembled. Whatever the sage of Ferney might be in the eyes of Journalists, of Academicians, of Encyclopædists, of the Royal Author of Berlin, of Revolutionists in the egg of his own hatching, of full grown infidels of his own spawning, of a world into which he had been for more than half a century industriously infusing a venom, the effects of which will be |