CHAPTER CCIV.

ADAM LITTLETON'S STATEMENT THAT EVERY MAN IS MADE UP OF THREE EGOS,—DEAN YOUNG—DISTANCE BETWEEN A MAN'S HEAD AND HIS HEART.

Perhaps when the Reader considers the copiousness of the argument, he will rather blame me for being too brief than too tedious.

DR JOHN SCOTT.

In the passage quoted from Adam Littleton in the preceding chapter, that good old divine enquired whether a man and himself were two. A Moorish prince in the most extravagant of Dryden's extravagant tragedies, (they do not deserve to be called romantic,) agrees with him, and exclaims to his confidential friend,

Assist me Zulema, if thou wouldst be The friend thou seem'st, assist me against me.

Machiavel says of Cosmo de Medici that who ever considered his gravity and his levity might say there were two distinct persons in him.

“There is often times,” says Dean Young, (father of the poet) “a prodigious distance betwixt a man's head and his heart; such a distance that they seem not to have any correspondence; not to belong to the same person, not to converse in the same world. Our heads are sometimes in Heaven, contemplating the nature of God, the blessedness of Saints, the state of eternity; while our hearts are held captive below in a conversation earthly, sensual, devilish. 'Tis possible we may sometimes commend virtue convincingly, unanswerably; and yet our own hearts be never affected by our own arguments; we may represent vice in her native dress of horror, and yet our hearts be not at all startled with their own menaces: We may study and acquaint ourselves with all the truths of religion, and yet all this out of curiosity, or hypocrisy, or ostentation; not out of the power of godliness, or the serious purpose of good living. All which is a sufficient proof that the consent of the Head and of the Heart are two different things.”

Dean Young may seem in this passage to have answered Adam the Lexicographist's query in the affirmative, by shewing that the head belongs sometimes to one Self and the heart to the other. Yet these two Selves, notwithstanding this continual discord, are so united in matrimony, and so inseparably made one flesh, that it becomes another query whether death itself can part them.

The aforesaid Dean concludes one of his Discourses with the advice of an honest heathen. _Learn to be one Man_; that is, learn to live and act alike. For says he, “while we act from contrary principles; sometimes give, and sometimes defraud; sometimes love and sometimes betray; sometimes are devout, and sometimes careless of God; this is to be _two_ Men, which is a foolish aim, and always ends in loss of pains. ‘No,’ says wise Epictetus, ‘_Learn to be one Man_,’ thou mayest be a good man; or thou mayest be a bad man, and that to the purpose; but it is impossible that thou shouldst be both. And here the Philosopher had the happiness to fall in exactly with the notion of my text. _We cannot serve two Masters._”

But in another sermon Adam Littleton says that “every man is made of three Egos, and has three Selfs in him;” and that this “appears in the reflection of Conscience upon actions of a dubious nature; whilst one Self accuses, another Self defends, and the third Self passes judgement upon what hath been so done by the man!” This he adduced as among various “mean and unworthy comparisons, whereby to show that though the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity” far exceeds our reason, there want not natural instances to illustrate it. But he adds most properly that we should neither “say or think ought of God in this kind,” without a preface of reverence and asking pardon; “for it is sufficient for us and most suitable to the mystery, so to conceive, so to discourse of God, as He himself has been pleased to make Himself known to us in his Word.”

If all theologians had been as wise, as humble and as devout as Adam Littleton, from how many heresies and evils might Christendom have been spared.

In the Doctor's own days the proposition was advanced, and not as a paradox, that a man might be in several places at the same time. _Presence corporelle de l'homme en plusieurs lieux prouvée possible par les principes de la bonne Philosophie_, is the title of a treatise by the Abbé de Lignac, who having been first a Jesuit, and then an Oratorian, secularized himself without departing from the principles in which he had been trained up. The object of his treatise was to show that there is nothing absurd in the doctrine of Transubstantiation. He made a distinction between man and his body, the body being always in a state of change, the man remaining the while identically the same. But how his argument that because a worm may be divided and live, the life which animated it while it was whole, continues a single life when it animates all the parts into which the body may have separated, proves his proposition, or how his proposition if proved could prove the hyper-mysterious figment of the Romish Church to be no figment, but a divine truth capable of philosophical demonstration, Œdipus himself were he raised from the dead would be unable to explain.