THE PHILOSCPHY OF A FUTURE STATE, 



him when he has committed an atrocious action, 

 ovfn when the perpetration of the crime is un 

 known to his fellow-men, and when he is placed 

 in circumstances which raise him above the fear 

 of human punishment. There have been nume 

 rous individuals, both in the higher and lower 

 ranks of life, who, without any external cause, or 

 apprehension of punishment from men, have been 

 seized with inward terrors, and have writhed 

 under the agonies of an accusing conscience, 

 which neither the charms of music, nor all the 

 other delights of the sons of men, had the least 

 power to assuage. Of the truth of this position, 

 the annals of history furnish us with many im 

 pressive examples. The following may suffice 

 as specimens : 



While Belshazzar was carousing at an impious 

 banquet with his wives and concubines and a 

 thousand of his nobles, the appearance of the 

 fingers of a man s hand, and of the writing on 

 an opposite wall, threw him into such consterna 

 tion, that his thoughts terrified him, the girdles 

 of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one 

 against another. His terror, in such circum 

 stances, cannot be supposed to have proceeded 

 from a fear of man ; for he was surrounded by 

 his guards and his princes, and all the delights of 

 music, and of a splendid entertainment. Nor 

 did it arise from the sentence of condemnation 

 written on the wall ; for he was then ignorant 

 both of the writing and of its meaning. But he 

 was conscious of the wickedness of which he 

 had been guilty, and of the sacrilegious impiety 

 in which he was then indulging, and, therefore, 

 the extraordinary appearance on the wall, was 

 considered as an awful foreboding of punishment 

 from that almighty and invisible Being whom he 

 had offended. Tiberius, one of the Roman em 

 perors, was a gloomy, treacherous, and cruel 

 tyrant. The lives of his people became the sport 

 of his savage disposition. Barely to take them 

 away was not sufficient, if their death was not 

 tormenting and atrocious. He ordered, on one 

 occasion, a general massacre of all who were 

 detained in prison, on account of the conspiracy 

 of Sejanus his minister, and heaps of carcasses 

 were piled up in the public places. His private 

 vices and debaucheries were also incessant, and 

 revolting to every principle of decency and vir 

 tue. Yet this tyrant, while acting in the pleni 

 tude of his power, and imagining himself beyond 

 the control of every law, had his mind tortured 

 with dreadful apprehensions. We are informed 

 by Tacitus, that in a letter to the Senate, he 

 opened the inward wounds of his breast, with 

 such words of despair as might have moved pity 

 in those who were under the continual fear of his 

 tyranny.* Neither the splendour of his situation 



Tiberium non fortuna, non solltudines protege- 

 bant, quin tormenta pectoris suasque pcenas ipse 

 fdteretur, &c. Tacitui- 



as an emperor, nor the solitary retreats to which 

 he retired, could shield him from the accusation* 

 of his conscience, but he himself was forced to 

 confess the mental agonies he endured as a pu 

 nishment for his crimes. Antiochus Epiphanet 

 was another tyrant remarkable for his cruelty and 

 impiety. He laid siege to the city of Jerusalem, 

 exercised the most horrid cruelties upon its inha 

 bitants, slaughtered forty thousand of them in 

 three days, and polluted, in the most impious 

 manner, the temple, and the worship of the God 

 of Israel. Some time afterwards, when he was 

 breathing out curses against the Jews for having 

 restored their ancient worship, and threatening to 

 destroy the whole nation, and to make Jerusalem 

 the common place of sepulture to all the .Jews, 

 he was seized with a grievous torment in his in 

 ward parts, and excessive pangs of the colic, 

 accompanied with such terrors as no remedies 

 could assuage. &quot; Worms crawled from every 

 part of him ; his flesh fell away piece-meal, and 

 the stench was so great that it became intoler 

 able to the whole army; and he thus finished an 

 impious life, by a miserable death.&quot;f During 

 this disorder, says Polybius, he was troubled 

 with a perpetual delirium, imagining that spec 

 tres stood continually before him, reproaching 

 him with his crimes. Similar relations are given 

 by historians, of Herod who slaughtered the in 

 fants at Bethlehem, of Galerius Maximiarms the 

 author of the tenth persecution against the 

 Christians, of the infamous Philip II. of Spain, 

 and of many others whqse names stand conspi 

 cuous on the rolls of impiety and crime. 



It is related of Charles IX. of France, who 

 ordered the horrible Bartholomew massacre, and 

 assisted in his bloody tragedy, that, ever afier, 

 he had a fierceness in his looks, and a colour in 

 his cheeks, which he never had before ; that Le 

 slept little and never sound ; and waked frequent 

 ly in great agonies, requiring soft music to com 

 pose him to rest ; and at length died of a linger 

 ing disorder, after having undergone the most 

 exquisite torments both of body and mind. 

 D Aubigne informs us that Henry IV. frequent 

 ly told, among his most intimate friends, that 

 eight days after the massacre of St. Bartholo 

 mew, he saw a vast number of ravens perch and 

 croak on the pavilion of the Louvre ; that the 

 same night Charles IX. after he had been two 

 hours in bed, started up, roused his grooms of the 

 chamber, and sent them out to listen to a great 

 noise of groans in the air, and among others, 

 some furious and threatening voices, the whole 

 resembling what was heard on the night of the 

 massacre ; that all these various cries were so 

 striking, so remarkable, and so articulate, that 

 Charles believing that the enemies of the Mont- 

 morencies and of their partisans had surprised 

 and attacked them, sent a detachment of hw 



t Rollin s An. Hist 



