"One mode of worship yields to another, but there never will be a country without a worship of some sort. Some will instance France; but the Parisians alone, and a fanatical faction of them, maintained for a short time the absurd dogma of theophilanthropy. If the English Church is upset, it will be by the hands of its own sectaries, not by those of skeptics. People are too wise, too well informed, to submit to an impious unbelief. There may exist a few speculators without faith; but they are small in numbers, and their opinions, being without enthusiasm or appeal to the passions, can not make proselytes unless they are persecuted, that being the only means of augmenting any sects."
"'I am always,' he writes in his memorandum, 'most religious upon a sunshiny day, as if there were some association, some internal approach to greater light and purity and the kindler of this dark lantern of our existence.
"'The night had also a religious influence, and even more so when I viewed the moon and stars through Herschel's telescope, and saw that they were worlds.'"
And what thought Byron of the existence of God? "Supposing even," he says, "that man existed before God, even his higher pre-Adamite supposititious creation must have had an origin and a creator, for a creation is a more natural imagination than a fortuitous concourse of atoms; all things remount to a fountain, though they may flow to an ocean.
"If, according to some speculations, you could prove the world many thousand years older than the Mosaic chronology, or if you could get rid of Adam and Eve, and the apple, and serpent, still what is to be set up in their stead? or how is the difficulty removed? Things must have had a beginning, and what matters it when or how?"
If Byron did not question the existence of God, did he doubt the spirituality and immortality of the soul? Here are some of his answers:—
"What is poetry?" he asked himself in his memorandum, and he replied—"The feeling of a former world and future." And further, in the same memorandum:—
"Of the immortality of the soul, it appears to me that there can be little doubt, if we attend to the action of the mind for a moment: it is in perpetual activity. I used to doubt it, but reflection has taught me better. The stoics Epictetus and Aurelius call the present state 'a soul which draws a carcass'—a heavy chain, to be sure, but all chains, being material, may be shaken off. How far our future life will be individual, or, rather, how far it will at all resemble our present existence, is another question; but that the mind is eternal, seems as probable as that the body is not so. Of course, I here venture upon the question without recurring to revelation, which, however, is at least as rational a solution of it as any other. A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd, except for purposes of punishment: and all punishment which is to revenge, rather than correct, must be morally wrong: and when the world is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer? Human passions have probably disfigured the Divine doctrines here; but the whole thing is inscrutable."
And again:—
"I have often been inclined to materialism in philosophy; but could never bear its introduction into Christianity, which appears to me essentially founded upon the soul. For this reason, Priestley's 'Christian Materialism' always struck me as deadly. Believe the resurrection of the body, if you will, but not without a soul. The deuce is in it, if after having had a soul (as, surely, the mind, or whatever you call it, is) in this world, we must part with it in the next, even for an immortal materiality; and I own my partiality for spirit."