CHAPTER CCXII.
SPECULATIONS CONNECTED WITH THE DOCTOR'S THEORY.—DOUBTS AND DIFFICULTIES.
_Voilà bien des mysteres, dira-t-on; j'en conviens; aussi le sujet le mérite-t-il bien. Au reste, il est certain que ces mysteres ne cachent rien de mauvais._
GOMGAM.
But although the conformity of the Bardic system to his own notions of progressive existence would have appeared to the Doctor
—confirmation strong As proof of holy writ,—
he would have assented to that system no farther than such preceding conformity extended. Holding it only as the result of his own speculations,—as hypothesis,—a mere fancy,—a toy of the mind,—a plaything for the intellect in its lighter moments, and sometimes in its graver ones the subject of a dream,—he valued it accordingly. And yet the more he sported with it, and the farther he pursued it in his reveries, the more plausible it appeared, and the better did it seem to explain some of the physical phenomena, and some of the else seemingly inexplicable varieties of human nature. It was Henry More's opinion that the Pre-existence of the Soul, which is so explicit and frequent a doctrine of the Platonists, “was a tenet for which there are many plausible reasons, and against which there is nothing considerable to be alleged; being a key, he said, for some main mysteries of Providence which no other can so handsomely unlock.” More however, the Doctor thought might be advanced against that tenet, than against his own scheme, for to that no valid objection could be opposed. But the metempsychosis in a descending scale as a scheme of punishment would have been regarded by him as one of those corruptions which the Bards derived from the vain philosophy or false religions of the Levant.
Not that this part of their scheme was without a certain plausibility on the surface which might recommend it to inconsiderate minds. He himself would have thought that no Judge ever pronounced a more just decision than the three Infernal Lord Chancellors of the dead would do, if they condemned his townsman the pettyfogger to skulk upon earth again as a pole-cat, creep into holes as an earwig, and be flattened again between the thumbnails of a London chambermaid, or exposed to the fatal lotion of Mr. Tiffin, bug-destroyer to his Majesty. It was fitting he thought that every keen sportsman, for once at least should take the part of the inferior creature in those amusements of the field which he had followed so joyously, and that he should be winged in the shape of a partridge, run down in the form of a hare by the hounds, and Actæonized in a stag: that the winner of a Welsh main should be the cock of one, and die of the wounds received in the last fight; that the merciless postmaster should become a posthorse at his own inn; and that they who have devised, or practised, or knowingly permitted any wanton cruelty for the sake of pampering their appetites, should in the next stage of their existence, feel in their own person the effect of those devices, which in their human state they had only tasted. And not being addicted himself to “the most honest, ingenuous, quiet, and harmless art of angling,” (forgive him Sir Humphrey Davy! forgive him Chantrey! forgive him, thou best of all publishers, John Major, who mightest write _Ne plus ultra_ upon thy edition of any book which thou delightest to honour) he allowed that even Izaak Walton of blessed memory could not have shown cause for mitigation of the sentence, if Rhadamanthus and his colleagues in the Court below, had condemned him to be spitted upon the hook of some dear lover and ornament of the art, in the shape of “a black snail with his belly slit to shew the white;” or of a perch which of fish, he tells us, is the longest lived on a hook; or sewed him metempsycho-sized into a frog, to the arming iron, with a fine needle and silk, with only one stitch, using him in so doing, according to his own minute directions, as if he loved him, that is, harming him as little as he possibly might, that he might live the longer.
This would be fitting he thought, and there would have been enough of purgatory in it to satisfy the sense of vindictive justice, if any scheme of purgatory had been reconcilable with his scriptural belief. Bishop Hall has a passage in his Choice Helps for a Pious spirit, which might be taken in the sense of this opinion, though certainly no such meaning was intended by the writer. “Man,” he says, “as he consists of a double nature, flesh and spirit, so is he placed in a middle rank, betwixt an angel, which is a spirit, and a beast, which is flesh: partaking of the qualities and performing the acts of both. He is angelical in his understanding, in his sensual affections bestial; and to whether of these he most incline and comforteth himself, that part wins more of the other, and gives a denomination to him; so as he that was before half angel, half beast, if he be drowned in sensuality, hath lost the angel and is become a beast; if he be wholly taken up with heavenly meditations, he hath quit the beast, and is improved angelical. It is hard to hold an equal temper, either he must degenerate into a beast, or be advanced to an angel.”
Had the Doctor held this opinion according to the letter, and believed that those who brutalized their nature in the stage of humanity, were degraded to the condition of brutes after death, he could even have persuaded himself that intelligible indications of such a transmigration might be discovered in the eyes of a dog when he looks to some hard master for mercy, or to some kind one for notice, and as it were for a recognition of the feelings and thoughts which had no other means of expression. But he could not have endured to think it possible that the spaniel who stood beside him in mute supplication, with half-erected ears, looking for a morsel of food, might be a friend or relation; and that in making a troublesome or a thievish cur slink away with his tail between his legs, he might be hurting the feelings of an old acquaintance.
And indeed on the whole it would have disturbed his sense of order, to think that while some inferior creatures were innocently and unconsciously ascending in the scale of existence through their appointed gradations, others were being degraded to a condition below humanity for their sins committed in the human state. Punishment such degradation could not be deemed, unless the soul so punished retained its consciousness; and such consciousness would make it a different being from those who were externally of its fellow kind, and thus would the harmony of nature be destroyed: and to introduce discord there were to bring back Chaos. Bad enough as he saw is the inequality which prevails among mankind, though without it men would soon be all upon the dead level of animal and ferine life: But what is it to that which would appear in the lower world, if in the same species some individuals were guided only by their own proper instincts, and others endued with the consciousness of a human and reasonable mind.
The consequences also of such a doctrine where it was believed could not but lead to pitiable follies, and melancholy superstitions. Has humanity ever been put to a viler use than by the Banians at Surat, who support a hospital for vermin in that city, and regale the souls of their friends who are undergoing penance in the shape of fleas, or in loathsome pedicular form, by hiring beggars to go in among them, and afford them pasture for the night!
Even from his own system consequences followed which he could not reconcile to his wishes. Fond as he was of animals, it would have been a delight to him if he could have believed with the certainty of faith that he should have with him in Heaven all that he had loved on earth. But if they were only so many vehicles of the living spirit during its ascent to humanity,—only the egg, the caterpillar and the aurelia from which the human but immortal Psyche was to come forth at last, then must their uses be at an end in this earthly state: and Paradise he was sometimes tempted to think would want something if there were no beautiful insects to hover about its flowers, no birds to warble in its groves or glide upon its waters,—would not be the Paradise he longed for unless the lion were there to lie down with the lamb, and the antelope reclined its gentle head upon the leopard's breast. Fitting and desirable and necessary he considered the extinction of all noxious kinds, all which were connected with corruption, and might strictly be said to be of the earth earthly. But in his Paradise he would fain have whatever had been in Eden, before Paradise was lost, except the serpent.
“I can hardly,” says an English officer who was encamped in India near a lake overstocked with fish, “I can hardly censure the taste of the Indians who banish from a consecrated pond, the net of the fisher, the angler's hook and the fowler's gun. Shoals of large fish giving life to the clear water of a large lake covered with flocks of aquatic birds, afford to the sight a gratification which would be ill exchanged for the momentary indulgence of appetite.” My excellent friend would heartily have agreed with this Englishman: but in the waters of Paradise he would have thought, neither did the fish prey upon each other, nor the birds upon them, death not being necessary there as the means of providing aliment for life.
That there are waters in the Regions of the Blessed, Bede it is said, assures us for this reason, that they are necessary there to temper the heat of the Sun. And Cornelius à Lapide has found out a most admirable use for them above the firmament,—which is to make rivers and fountains and waterworks for the recreation of the souls in bliss, whose seat is in the Empyrean Heaven.
“If an herd of kine,” says Fuller, “should meet together to fancy and define happiness,—(that is to imagine a Paradise for themselves,)—they would place it to consist in fine pastures, sweet grass, clear water, shadowy groves, constant summer; but if any winter, then warm shelter and dainty hay, with company after their kind, counting these low things the highest happiness, because their conceit can reach no higher. Little better do the heathen poets describe Heaven, paving it with pearl and roofing it with stars, filling it with Gods and Goddesses, and allowing them to drink, (as if without it, no poet's Paradise) nectar and ambrosia.”