266 REMARKS ON THE PHILOSOPHY 



Are brought, and feel by turns the bitter change 

 Of fierce extremes, extremes by change more fierce. 

 From beds of raging fire to starve in ice 

 Their soft ethereal warmth, and there to pine 

 Immoveable, infix'd, and frozen round, 

 Periods of time ; thence hurried back to fire." 



The vulgar will be vulgar still : hence the Hell of many a sim- 

 ple, warm-hearted Christian, is only the exaggeration of bodily pain: 

 nor would they pardon the blasphemy of supposing that the penalty 

 of fire was metaphorical. Had we adopted the Nisthemi of our 

 Saxon ancestors, instead of the Egyptian Hell, it would have been 

 more poetical, though, perhaps, less dreadful. " This was a place 

 consisting of nine worlds, reserved for those who die of disease and 

 old age. Hela, or Death, there exercised her despotic power ; her 

 palace was anguish ; her table, famine ; her waiters, were expec- 

 tation and delay ; the threshold of her door was precipice ; her bed, 

 leanness ;" &c* 



The sceptic in religion may plead against the divinity of revela- 

 tiont that the first principle of every religion — rewards and punish- 

 ments — betrays an earthly rather than a divine origin, and which 

 arises as much out of our selfishness as the fallibility of human 

 judgment. The procedure and judgment of the Creator is natu- 

 rally predicted by the verdict of an earthly judgment, as our ideas 

 of the character and attributes of the Deity are formed by the high- 

 est possible perfections of man, or as our idea of eternity is formed, 

 by the extension of time, beyond which human comprehension can- 

 not pass. 



Rewards to us would cease to be such, if there were no penalties, 

 and the latter is as essential to mankind as the former : the thought 

 of an hereafter penalty has afforded to the devotee no little of that 

 satisfaction which his self-martyrdom seemed justly to merit ; for 

 what becomes of self-denial, if the ultimate doom be universally the 

 same ? Earth teaches punishment, for such is inevitable with our 

 inexperience and ignorance ; but in a more perfect and higher na- 

 ture, suffering may not, perhaps, be a concomitant. 



Claudio continues — " the weariest and most loathed worldly life, 

 that age, ach, penury, and imprisonment can lay on nature, is a 

 paradise to what we fear of death." This is infinitely finer than 

 Hamlet's soliloquy — more positively true ; this is " that pale cast of 



* See Mallet's North. Antiq., vol. i., p. 121. 



■f The word revelation here does not apply to the Bible, which, of course, 

 must be received has an exception to the above remarks. 



