Robert. God bless your honour for your kindness to my poor father.
John. Pray, now make haste. You may chance to come in time.
[Robert goes out.]
John. Go get some firewood, Francis,
And get my supper ready. [Francis goes out.]
The night is bitter cold.
They in their graves feel nothing of the cold,
Or if they do, how dull a cold—
All clayey, clayey. Ah God! who waits below?
Come up, come quick. I saw a fearful sight.
Francis returns in haste with wood.
John. There are such things as spirits, deny it who may.
Is it you, Francis? Heap the wood on thick,
We two shall sup together, sup all night,
Carouse, drink drunk, and tell the merriest tales—
Tell for a wager, who tells merriest—
But I am very weak. O tears, tears, tears,
I feel your just rebuke. [Goes out.]
Scene changes to a bed-room. John sitting alone: a lamp burning by him.
"Infinite torments for finite offences." I will never believe it. How divines can reconcile this monstrous tenet with the spirit of their Theology! They have palpably failed in the proof, for to put the question thus:—If he being infinite—have a care, Woodvil, the latitude of doubting suits not with the humility of thy condition. What good men have believed, may be true, and what they profess to find set down clearly in their scriptures, must have probability in its defence[40]. Touching that other question the Casuists with one consent have pronounced the sober man accountable for the deeds by him in a state of drunkenness committed, because tho' the action indeed be such as he, sober, would never have committed, yet the drunkenness being an act of the will, by a moral fiction, the issues are accounted voluntary also. I lose my sleep in attending to these intricacies of the schoolmen. I lay till daybreak the other morning endeavouring to draw a line of distinction between sin of direct malice and sin of malice indirect, or imputable only by the sequence. My brain is overwrought by these labours, and my faculties will shortly decline into impotence. [Throws himself on a bed.]
End of the Fourth Act.
[Footnote 40: Lamb had crossed out this passage from "Infinite torments," and written at "touching" "begin here.">[