Chapter 13

1815, Living individual 1 1785, His father and mother 2 1755, Their fathers and mothers 4 1725, ditto 8 1695, ditto 16 1665, ditto 32 1635, ditto 64 1605, ditto 128 1575, ditto 256 1545, ditto 512 1515, ditto 1024 1485, ditto 2048 1455, ditto 4096 1425, ditto 8192 1395, ditto 16384 1365, ditto 32768 1335, ditto 65536 1305, ditto 131072 1275, ditto 262144 1245, ditto 524288 1215, ditto 1048576 1185, ditto 2097152 1155, ditto 4194304 1125, ditto 8388608

That is to say, if there have been a regular co-mixture of marriages, every individual of the living race must of necessity be descended from parents who lived in Britain in 1125. Some districts or clans may require a longer period for the co-mixture, and different circumstances may cut off some families, and expand others; but, in general, the lines of families would cross each other, and become interwoven _like the lines of lattice-work_. A single inter-mixture, however remote, would unite all the subsequent branches in common ancestry, rendering the cotemporaries of every nation members of one expanded family, after the lapse of an ascertainable number of generations!

This principle is curious; and, though in one view it has been applied to calculations of increasing population, yet I am not aware that it has previously received the moral application which I draw from it, in regard to the commixture of the human race. My ideas may be better conceived, if any person draw two parallel lines to represent the respective contemporary populations of two distinct epochs; and then set up on the lower line an indefinite number of triangles. In this scheme we shall have a just picture of the progressive generations of every nation, and we may observe how necessarily, in spite of artifice and pride, they must, by intermarriages, be blended as one family and one flesh, owing to the individuals of each pair springing from a different apex, and to every side being necessarily crossed by the sides of other triangles. By a converse reasoning, or by tracing the lines from the apex to the base, we may trace the descent as well as the ascent; and, by a glance of the eye, ascertain not only that every individual of a living generation must be descended from the whole of the parents of some generation sufficiently remote, but that every parent in such remote generation must necessarily have been the ancestor of every individual of a contemporary generation.

If, during the Crusades, any of the English intermarried with Greeks, or Syrians, or Italians, all of whom must, by intermingling, have been descendants of the great men of antiquity, so all the English of this age must be connected in blood with those intermarriages, and be descended from the heroes of the classic ages. But let not pride triumph in this consideration; for every malefactor in every age, who left children, was equally an ancestor of the living race! The ancient union of France and England, and of Belgium and Germany with England, must have rendered those people near of kin; while each adjoining nation, mixing with its neighbours, must have blended the whole human race in one great family of remote common origin. This reasoning explains the cause of national physiognomy and character, the co-mixture of foreign nations being inconsiderable, and not sufficient to effect general characteristic changes; while each nation becomes, in the course of ages, one common and blended family, in physiognomy, character, and genius. May so plain a demonstration of this great truth be the means of promoting their concord, their love, the interchange of mutual good offices, and their common happiness!

The messenger having brought the key, I was admitted into Mortlake church, the first glance of whose venerable structure, carried my imagination back through many distant ages, and generated a multitude of interesting associations. Every part of the building bore an air of antique simplicity; and it seemed truly worthy of being the place where the inhabitants of a village ought to meet periodically to receive lessons of moral instruction, and pour forth their thanksgivings to the First Cause of the effects which daily operate on them as so many blessings. Happy system!--so well adapted to the actual condition of society, and so capable, when well directed, of producing the most salutary effects on the temper and habits of the people. Thrice happy man, that parish-priest, who feels the extent and importance of his duties, and performs them for their own reward, not as acts of drudgery, or to gratify selfish feelings! Enviable seat, that pulpit, where power is conferred by law and by custom, of teaching useful truths, and of conveying happiness, through the force of principles, to the fire-sides of so many families! Delightful picture!--what more, or what better, could wisdom contrive?--A day of rest--a place sanctified for instruction--habits of attendance--a teacher of worth and zeal--his precepts carried from the church to the fire-side--and there regulating and governing all the actions and relations of life!

Such, however, is the composition of the picture, only as seen on a sunny day! Alas! the passions and weaknesses of men deny its frequent realization! Authorised instructors cannot enjoy the reputation of superior wisdom without being excited by vanity, and led to play the fool--they cannot understand two or three dialects without becoming coxcombs--they cannot wear a robe of office without being uplifted by pride--and they cannot be appointed expounders of the simple elements of morals, without fancying themselves in possession of _a second sight_, and discovering a _double_ sense in every text of Scripture! From this weakness of human nature arise most of the mysteries which discredit religion,--hence the incomprehensible jargon of sects--hence the substitution of the shadow of faith for the substance of good works--hence the distraction of the people on theological subjects--and hence, in fine, its too common inefficacy and insufficiency in preserving public morals, evinced, among other bad effects, in its tolerance of vindictive Christian wars.

I appeal, therefore, to conscientious teachers of the people, whether it is not their duty to avoid discussions in the pulpit on mysteries which never edify, because never understood; and to confine their discourses to such topics as those indicated in _the Sermon of Jesus on the Mount_. Such, at least, appears to be the proper duty of a national establishment! Empirics may raise the fury of fanaticism about mysteries with impunity--every absurdity may, for its season, be embodied in particular congregations--and infidelity, of all kinds, may be proclaimed at the corners of the streets without danger, provided the #NATIONAL CHURCH# be founded on the broad principles of virtue, and on the practice of those morals which are so beautifully expounded in the New Testament; and provided the parochial clergy do not mix themselves with those visionary topics which depend for success more on zeal and credulity, than on argument or reason. Such a church must flourish, as long as common sense, and a respect for virtue, govern the majority. In this view, I lament, however, that a revision has not taken place of those _articles of faith_ which were promulgated in the sixteenth century, by men newly converted, and perhaps but half converted, from the Romish faith, and taught to a people then unprepared to receive all the changes which reason demanded. As a friend, therefore, to that religion which preserves the public morals, I hope to live to see many of those articles qualified which treat of mysteries conceived in the dark ages of monkish superstition, and countenanced by scholastic logic; considering that such qualification would probably lead to greater concord in matters of the highest importance to society, and serve to establish the Anglican Church on the immoveable bases of reason and truth. It seems, indeed, to be high time that Protestant churches, of all denominations, should come to some agreement in regard to the full extent of the errors which, during twelve centuries, were introduced into the Christian religion by the craft or ignorance of the Church of Rome. Did the early reformers detect the whole of them? And, if in the opinion of discreet persons they did not, or, as is reasonable to suppose, they could not, is it not important to examine conscientious doubts, and to restore the religion of Christ, which we profess, to its original purity, and to #THE ONLY STANDARD OF TRUTH#, which God has given to man, #THE LIGHT OF HIS EXPERIENCE AND REASON#.

Such were the considerations that forced themselves upon me, as I paced the aisles of this sanctuary of religion. Nor could I avoid reflecting on the false associations which early prejudices attach to such enclosures of four walls. By day, they are an object of veneration; by night, an object of terror. Perhaps no person in Mortlake would singly pass a long night in this solemn structure, for the fee-simple of half the town! The objects of their fears none could, or would, justify; yet the anticipated horrors of passing a night in a church seems universal! Perhaps some expect, that the common elementary principles which once composed the bodies of the decomposed dead, would, for the occasion, be collected again from the general storehouse of the atmosphere and earth, and would exhibit themselves, on their re-organization, more hurtful than at first. Perhaps others expect that some of those unembodied spirits, with which mythology and priestcraft have in all ages deluded the vulgar,--though no credible evidence or natural probability was ever adduced of the existence or appearance of any such spirits,--would without bodies appear to their visual organs, and torment or injure them!--Yes--monstrous and absurd though it be--such are the prevalent weaknesses created by superstition, and wickedly instilled into infant minds in the nursery, so as to govern the feelings and conduct of ninety-nine of every hundred persons in our comparatively enlightened society.

It should now be well understood, that what is contrary to uniform experience ought to be no object of faith--consequently what no man ever saw, none need expect to see--and what never did harm, none need fear! In this view our poets might aid the work of public education, by dispensing with their machinery of ideal personages, as tending to keep alive that superstition, which a #Wordsworth# has recently proved to be unnecessary, in a poem that rivals the efforts of the Rosicrucian school. Ought not the ghosts of Shakespeare to be _supposed_ merely as the effects of diseased vision, or a guilty imagination? Ought an enlightened audience to tolerate the mischievous impressions produced on the minds of ignorance or youth by the gross exhibitions which now disgrace our stage in Hamlet, Richard, and Macbeth? We all know that fever of the brain produces successions of spectres or images, the result of diseased organs; but no one ever conceived that such melancholy effects of disease could be seen by healthy by-standers, till our stage-managers availed themselves of vulgar credulity, and dared to give substance to diseased ideas as a means of gratifying their avarice? If Shakespeare intended to give visible substance to his numerous ghosts, he merely conformed himself to the state of knowledge in his day, when Demonology was sanctioned by royal authority, and when the calendars at the assizes were filled with victims of superstition, under charges of witchcraft! It is, however, time that we banish such credulity from the minds even of the lowest vulgar, as disgraceful to religion, education, morals, and reason!

Humanly speaking, I exclaimed--Am I not in the House of God? Is not this puny structure a tribute of man to the Architect of the Universe? What a lesson for man's pride!--look at this building, and behold the Universe! Man is but a point of infinite space, with intellectual powers, bound in their sphere of action to his body, and subject with it to the laws of motion and gravitation! For such a being this may properly be the house of God; but it ought never to be forgotten, that the only house of God is a universe as boundless as his powers, and as eternal as his existence! In relation to man and man's pride, what a sublime and overwhelming contrast is presented by the everlasting #NOW#, and the universal #HERE#! Yet how can the creature of mere relations, who exists by generating time, space, and other sensations, conceive of the immutable #CAUSE OF CAUSES#, to whom his past and future, and his above and below, are as a #SINGLE TOTALITY#! Wisest of men is he who knows the most of such a Being; but, chained to a point, and governed in all our reasonings by mere relative powers, we can only conceive of _ubiquity_ by the contrast of our _locality_--of _infinity_ by our _dimensions_--of _eternity_ by our _duration_--and of _omniscience_ by our _reason_! Creatures of yesterday, surrounded by blessings, it is natural we should inquire in regard to the origin and cause of the novel state in which we find ourselves; but the _finite_ cannot reason on the _infinite_--the _transient_ on the _eternal_--or the _local_ on the _universal_; and on such subjects all we can ascertain, is the utter inadequacy of our powers to perceive them clearly. It seems, therefore, to be our duty to #ENJOY#, to #WONDER#, and to #WORSHIP#.

On every side of me I beheld records of the wrecks of man, deposited here merely to increase the sympathy of the living for the place. Perhaps I was even breathing some of the gaseous effluvia which once composed their living bodies: but, the gas of a human body differing in no respect from the gas generated in the great laboratory of the earth's surface, which I breathe hourly; and being in itself innoxious in quantity, if not in quality, I felt no qualms from my consciousness of its source. The putrefactive process decomposes the bodies of all animals, and returns their generic principles to the common reservoirs of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen: through life, the same process, varied in its proportions, is going forward; and the body is constantly resolving itself into the generic principles of nature, which generic principles again serve the purposes of respiration in other animals, and renew other existences as suitably as though they had never before been employed for the same purposes. Hence it is probable that the identical atoms composing any of the elements of nature, may have existed in hundreds of different animals in different ages of the world; and hence we arrive at a principle of metempsychosis, without entangling ourselves in the absurdities with which priestcraft among the Eastern nations has clothed and disguised it.

Various tablets placed around the walls record departed worth in many persons of distinction. I could find no memorials of the impostor #Dee#, whose aged remains were deposited here. He was one of the last of the race of those men of science who made use of his knowledge to induce the vulgar to believe him a conjuror, or one possessed of the power of conversing with #SPIRITS#. His journals of this pretended intercourse were published after his death, by one of the Casaubons, in two folio volumes. Lilly's Memoirs record many of his impostures, and there is no doubt but in his time the public mind was much agitated by his extravagancies. The mob more than once destroyed his house, for being familiar with their devil; and, what is more extraordinary, he was often consulted, and even employed in negociations, by Queen Elizabeth. He pretended to see spirits in a small stone, lately preserved with his papers in the British Museum. His spirits appear to have had bodies and garments thick enough to reflect rays of light, though they passed freely in and out of his stone, and through the walls of his room; and organs for articulation, which they exercised within the glass! How slight an advance in knowledge exposes all such impostures! In his spiritual visions, Dee had a confederate of the name of Kelly, who, of course, confirmed all the oracles of his master. Both, however, in spite of their spiritual friends, died miserably--the man by leaping out of a window, and the master in great poverty. Dee is the less excusable, because he was a man of family and considerable learning, a fellow of Trinity-college, Cambridge, and a good mathematician. But, in an age in which one Queen imprisoned him for practising by enchantment against her life, and her successor required him to name a lucky day for her coronation, is it to be wondered that a mere man, like tens of thousands of our modern religious fanatics, persuaded himself that he was possessed of supernatural powers?

Beneath the same pavement, resolved into kindred elements, though when in chemical union so different a totality, lie the remains of that illustrious patriot, Sir John Barnard, who passed a long life in opposing the encroachments on liberty of the ministers of the first and second of the #Guelphs#. His statue in the Royal Exchange, London, would attest his worth, if the same area was not disgraced by another, of the infamous Charles the Second, thereby confounding virtue and vice. Sir John, like Alderman Barber, acquired fame by his opposition to the Excise Laws, and by other exertions in defence of public liberty, I have been told by one who still remembers him, that he was an active little man, adored by the Common Hall, and much respected by various political parties for his long-tried worth.

On the south side of the Communion-table, I was so well pleased with some verses lately placed on a marble tablet, to record the virtues of the Viscountess Sidmouth, who died June 23, 1811, that I could not refrain from copying them. The Viscount and his family have a pew in the church, and, I am told, are constant attendants at the morning-service on Sundays.

Not that to mortal eyes thy spotless life Shew'd the best form of parent, child, and wife; Not that thy vital current seem'd to glide, Clear and unmix'd, through the world's troublous tide; That grace and beauty, form'd each heart to win, Seem'd but the casket to the gem within: Not hence the fond presumption of our love, Which lifts the spirit to the Saints above; But that pure Piety's consoling pow'r Thy life illum'd, and cheer'd thy parting hour; That each best gift of charity was thine, The liberal feeling and the grace divine; And e'en thy virtues humbled in the dust, In Heav'n's sure promise was thine only trust; Sooth'd by that hope, Affection checks the sigh, And hails the day-spring of eternity.

Whenever the remains of the lord of this amiable woman are deposited on the same spot, I venture humbly and respectfully to suggest, that the tablet to his memory should include a copy of the most eventful document of his life and times. He was prime-minister when, in March 1803, the ever-to-be-lamented message charging the French with making extensive military preparations in the ports of France and Holland, was advised by the ministry to be sent to both Houses of Parliament. During the past year he had obtained the glory of concluding a treaty which restored tranquillity to a suffering world; and yet the virulence of a contemptible Opposition, and the empirical pretensions of an Ex-minister, led him and his colleagues tardily to execute the article which was to restore Malta to its Knights. A demand that this article should be executed, led to discussions since made public, but which, in my opinion, have not justified the character given of them in the message. Nor does it appear that the English ambassador at Paris had inquired or remonstrated with the French Government on the subject of the pretended military preparations. The flame, however, was thus kindled, which spread in due time from kingdom to kingdom; covering the whole earth with blood and desolation, wasting millions of lives in battle, siege, imprisonment, or massacre; and transferring all the rentals and industry of the people of England to the public creditors, to pay the interest of loans and other consequent obligations of the state!

Unhappily the #GENIUS# of #TRUTH# was hoodwinked at the time, by the general corruption of the press; and the #SPIRIT# of #PATRIOTISM# was overawed by the passionate clamours of a whole people to be avenged for various alledged affronts! But at this distance of time these are merely topics for the lamentation of history! It is now, I fear, too late to institute legislative inquiries; but the case will remain as a beacon to all people, who should be taught by it to consider ministers of the Crown, though as amiable in private life as an #Addington#, as fallible men, liable to be misled by intrigue or passion, and therefore, in a public sense, not to be _credited_ without other evidence than their own assertions. Let an exemplary #INSCRIPTION# on the tomb of the minister of that day serve therefore to teach all ministers, never wilfully to depart in the most indifferent act of public policy from #THE TRUTH#; and warn them to pause before they commit the extensive interests of nations, while they or the people are under the influence of passion. Alas! what frightful mischiefs might have been averted if these considerations had governed the English people, or the English ministry, during the fatal discussions of Lord Whitworth at Paris!

In charity, I hope the Ministry believed that this dispute might have ended with a mere demonstration; and I admit that no man can foresee all the consequences of an action: yet, as the feelings which excited that message and directed those deliberations, continued to influence the Ministry during twelve years warfare, and led to the rejection of seven overtures for peace, made at different times by #Napoleon#; the character of the age and the future security of the world against wars of aggression, seem to require that the origin of the late war should even yet become an object of solemn parliamentary inquiry. The Crown may have the constitutional power of declaring war, but the ministers of the Crown are responsible for the abuse of that power; and let it be remembered, that the origin of every war is easily tried by tests to be found in #Grotius#, #Puffendorf#, #Vattel#, or other authorities on the laws of nations; and that, without the combination of justice and necessity in its origin, no true glory can be acquired in its progress or in its results.[6]