In all this business I cannot but admire the goodness of the Almighty in protecting me from many evils to which I might easily have been led by my troubled feelings.
[Diary continued.]
Read Dr. Isaac Barrow’s sermon on submission to the Divine will. He seems a powerful writer, but his language is debased by expressions void of all dignity. Read a good deal in Barrow on the pre-existence of human souls. Very singular; the texts on which he builds support him very faintly, yet there is a degree of probability in the system consonant to reason.
30th.—Prayed to God over the remains of my dear child, and the circumstance fills my mind with that melancholy that is not unsuitable to religious feelings. I do not wonder at the custom of the primitive Christians praying at the tombs of the departed, it is an obvious and natural prejudice.
Finished Barrow, and wrote to my friend Mr. Cole to desire he would apply to his neighbour, the learned Bryant, to know his opinion of that question. Began Dr. More on the ‘Immortality of the Soul.’ Capel Lofft spent the day with us; his conversation is ready on any subject, and mine led to serious ones, which he seems to like. We had much that was metaphysical on the soul (pre-existence), a future state, &c. He is of opinion that heaven is not so very different from our ideas of what this world might be, as are commonly entertained; and rightly observes, that if death, evil, anxiety, and disease, with corporeal passions, were banished, this earth would be a heaven; and that the knowledge of one another hereafter is not at all inconsistent with our Saviour’s expression, ‘in My Father’s house are many mansions.’
31st.—Read Littleton’s sermon on the necessity of well husbanding our time. It is excellent, he has thoughts and modes of expanding his observations that are beyond the common run. Laid aside Dr. More on the ‘Immortality of the Soul;’ he gets so high in the region of fancy, and is so full of jargon and supposition, under the formula of demonstrations, that I am disgusted with his farrago; and [there is] so much on witches, apparitions, &c., as to be mere rubbish.
Read Sherlock’s sixth sermon on the ‘Immortality of the Soul,’ which is an admirable one. I see plainly from what I feel upon occasion of the severe, dreadfully severe misfortune that I have met with, that under great afflictions there can be no real consolation but in religion. I have mused and meditated much on what philosophy, as it is called, could afford in such an exigency, but the amount would be no more than the employment of the mind, and preventing its dwelling without interruption on the loss sustained, the comfort to be drawn from it would be weak and vain; but the Gospel offers considerations which bear immediately on the source of the evil; affords matter of consolation in the certainty of another life, and in those promises which meet the yearnings of the distempered soul; diffuses a calm and quiet resignation to the Divine will, under the pleasing hope of seeing those again in the next world whom we have loved tenderly in this. To me it seems that when this wish is founded on a virtuous object here as that of a parent and a child, the very hope is an argument in its favour, because it is perfectly consistent with infinite benevolence to grant it—and the desire must be universal in every human mind.
August 1.—Read about half of Sherlock on ‘Immortality,’ but my patience was then quite exhausted; the verbiage is such that it sickens one, though I approve the doctrine entirely and agree with him in everything. What a loss! that excellent books for matter should be so written, or rather spun into such endless circumlocutions that time is wasted for want of compression. Read three or four sermons of Littleton—clear, lucid, and impressive.
At night a Dane came, recommended by Sir J. Sinclair. Unfortunate to all my feelings. I refuse dining with all my friends, and to be tormented with a trifler who can speak neither French nor English.
My mind is in a state that cannot bear interruption. I love to mope alone, and reflect on my misery.