GLOOMY PROSPECTS OF INFIDELITY. 



163 



returned upon a relapse ; and he had again re 

 course to the miserable remedy. He acknow 

 ledged to Dr. Tronchin, his physician, the ago 

 nies of his mind, and earnestly entreated him to 

 procure for his perusal a treatise written against 

 the eternity of future punishment. These facts 

 were communicated to Dr. Cogan, by a gentle 

 man highly respected in the philosophical world, 

 who received them directly from .Dr. Tronchin; 

 and they concur with many others, in demon 

 strating the impossibility of enjoying permanent 

 felicity without the hopes and consolations of 

 religion. M. Sechelles, to whose narrative I 

 lately referred, relates, that, in one of his conver 

 sations with Buffbn, the Count declared, &quot; I 

 hope to live two or three years longer, to indulge 

 my habit of working in literary avocations. I 

 am not afraid of death, and am consoled by the 

 thought, that my name will never die. I feel 

 myself fully recompensed for all my labours, by 

 the respect which Europe has paid to my talents, 

 and by the flattering letters I have received from 

 the most exalted personages.&quot; Such were the 

 consolations which this philosopher enjoyed in 

 the prospect of the extinction of his being. His 

 name would live when he himself was r or ever 

 blotted out from that creation which it was the 

 object of his writings to describe ! But, that 

 his mind was not altogether reconciled to the 

 idea of sinking into eternal oblivion, may be in 

 ferred from another anecdote, related by the 

 same gentleman. &quot; One evening I read to Buf- 

 fon the verses of Thomas on the immortality of 

 the soul. He smiled. Par dieu, says he, 

 1 religion would be a valuable gift if all this were 

 true. &quot; This remark evidently implied, that the 

 system he had adopted was not calculated to pre 

 sent so cheerful a prospect of futurity as the 

 system of Revelation. 



Gibbon, the celebrated historian of the Rise 

 and Fall of the Roman Empire, had his mind 

 early tinctured with the principles of infidelity ; 

 and his historical writings are distinguished by 

 several insidious attacks on Christianity, by un 

 fair and unmanly sneers at the religion of his 

 country, and by the loose and disrespectful man 

 ner in which he mentions many points of morali 

 ty regarded as important, even on the principles 

 of natural religion. Such appears to have been 

 his eagerness in this cause, that he stooped to 

 the most despicable pun, or to the most awkward 

 perversion of language, for the pleasure of turn 

 ing the Scripture into ribaldry, or calling Jesus 

 an impostor. Yet he appears to have been ac 

 tuated by the same spirit of hypocrisy which 

 distinguished Buffon and his philosophical asso 

 ciates; for, notwithstanding his aversion to 

 C iristianity, he would have felt no scruple in 

 a pting an office in the church, provided it had 

 .iributed to his pecuniary interests. On the 

 ;casion of his father having been obliged to 



mortgage part of his estate, he thus expresses 

 himself: &quot; I regret that I had not embraced the 

 lucrative pursuits of the law or of trade, the 

 chances of civil office or India adventure, or even 

 the fat slumbers of the church&quot; Such is too 

 frequently the morality displayed by infidels, 

 and there is reason to suspect that the church is 

 not altogether purged of them even in the pre 

 sent day. That Gibbon s principles were not 

 sufficient to support his mind in the prospect of 

 dissolution, appears from many expressions in 

 the collection of his letters published by Lord 

 Sheffield, in which are to be traced many in 

 stances of the high value which he placed upon 

 existence, and of the regret with which he per 

 ceived his years to be rapidly passing away. 

 His letter on the death of Mrs. Posen, bears 

 every mark of the despondent state of his mind 

 at the idea, that, &quot; all is now lost, finally, irre 

 coverably lost! 1 He adds, &quot;I will agree with 

 my lady, that the immortality of the soul is, at 

 some times, a very comfortable doctrine.&quot; The 

 announcement of his death, in the public prints, 

 in January 1794, was accompanied with this 

 remark, &quot; He left this world in gloomy despon 

 dency, without those hopes and consolations 

 which cheer the Christian in the prospects of 

 immortality.&quot; Dr. A. Smith, in the account he 

 gives of the last illness of Hume, the historian, 

 seems to triumph in the fortitude which he ma 

 nifested in the prospect of his dissolution, and he 

 adduces a playfulness of expression as an evi 

 dence of it, in his jocular allusion to Charon 

 and his boat. But, as Dr. Cogan, in his treatise 

 on the passions, very properly remarks,&quot; A mo 

 ment of vivacity, upon the visit of a friend, will 

 not conduct us to the recesses of the heart, or 

 discover its feelings in the hours of solitude.&quot; 

 It is, indeed, altogether unnatural for a man who 

 set so high a value upon his literary reputation, 

 and certainly very unsuitable to the momentous 

 occasion, to indulge in such childish pleasantries, 

 as Hume is represented to have done, at the 

 moment when he considered himself as just about 

 to be launched into non-existence ; and, therefore, 

 we have some reason to suspect, that his appa 

 rent tranquillity was partly the effect of vanity 

 and affectation. He has confessed, says Dr. 

 Cogan, in the most explicit terms, that his prin 

 ciples were not calculated to administer consola 

 tion to a thinking mind. This appears from the 

 following passage in his treatise on Human 

 Nature. &quot; I am affrighted and confounded 

 with that forlorn solitude in which I am placed 

 by my philosophy. When I look abroad, I fore 

 see, on every side, dispute, contradiction, and 

 distraction. When I turn my eye inward, I find 

 nothing but doubt and ignorance. Where am I, 

 or what ? From what causes do I derive my 

 existence, and to what condition shall I return? 

 I am confounded with these questions, and be- 



