Sir Kenelm Digby went to Holland for the purpose of conversing with Descartes, who was then living in retirement at Egmont. Speculative knowledge, Digby said to him, was no doubt a refined and agreeable pursuit, but it was too uncertain and too useless to be made a man's occupation, life being so short that one has scarcely time to acquire well the knowledge of necessary things. It would be far more worthy of a person like Descartes, he observed, who so well understood the construction of the human frame, if he would apply himself to discover means of prolonging its duration, rather than attach himself to the mere speculation of philosophy. Descartes made answer that this was a subject on which he had already meditated; that as for rendering man immortal, it was what he would not venture to promise, but that he was very sure he could prolong his life to the standard of the Patriarchs.
Saint-Evremond to whom Digby repeated this, says that this opinion of Descartes was well known both to his friends in Holland and in France. The Abbé Picot, his disciple and his martyr, was so fully persuaded of it that it was long before he would believe his master was dead, and when at length unwillingly convinced of what it was no longer possible to deny or doubt, he exclaimed, que c'en étoit fait et que la fin du Genre humain alloit venir!
A certain Sicilian physician who commented upon Galen was more cautious if not more modest than Descartes. He affirmed that it was certainly possible to render men immortal, but then they must be bred up from the earliest infancy with that view; and he undertook so to train and render them,—if they were fit subjects.—Poor children! if it had indeed been possible thus to divest them of their reversionary interest in Heaven.
A much better way of abolishing death was that which Asgill imagined, when he persuaded himself from Scripture that it is in our power to go to Heaven without any such unpleasant middle passage. Asgill's is the worst case of intolerance that has occurred in this country since persecution has ceased to affect life or member.
This remarkable man was born about the middle of the seventeenth century and bred to the Law in Lincoln's Inn under Mr. Eyre a very eminent lawyer of those days. In 1698 he published a treatise with this title—“Several assertions proved, in order to create another species of money than Gold and Silver,” and also an “Essay on a Registry for Titles of Lands.” Both subjects seem to denote that on these points he was considerably advanced beyond his age. But the whole strength of his mind was devoted to his profession, in which he had so completely trammelled and drilled his intellectual powers that he at length acquired a habit of looking at all subjects in a legal point of view. He could find flaws in an hereditary title to the crown. But it was not to seek flaws that he studied the Bible; he studied it to see whether he could not claim under the Old and New Testament something more than was considered to be his share. The result of this examination was that in the year 1700 he published “An Argument proving that according to the Covenant of Eternal Life revealed in the Scriptures Man may be translated from hence into that Eternal Life without passing through death, although the Human Nature of Christ himself could not be thus translated till he had passed through death.”
That, the old motto, (says he) worn upon tomb-stones, “Death is the Gate of Life,” is a lie, by which men decoy one another into death, taking it to be a thorough-fare into Eternal Life, whereas it is just so far out of the way. For die when we will, and be buried where we will, and lie in the grave as long as we will, we must all return from thence and stand again upon the Earth before we can ascend into the Heavens. “Hinc itur ad astra.” He admitted that “this custom of the world to die hath gained such a prevalency over our minds by prepossessing us of the necessity of death, that it stands ready to swallow his argument whole without digesting it.” But the dominion of death, he said, is supported by our fear of it, by which it hath bullied the world to this day. Yet “the custom of the World to die is no argument one way or other;” however, because he knew that custom itself is admitted as an evidence of title, upon presumption that such custom had once a reasonable commencement and that this reason doth continue, it was incumbent upon him to answer this Custom by shewing the time and reason of its commencement and that the reason was determined.
“First then,” says he, “I do admit the custom or possession of Death over the world to be as followeth: that Death did reign from Adam to Moses by an uninterrupted possession over all men women and children, created or born, except one breach made upon it in that time by Enoch; and hath reigned from Moses unto this day by the like uninterrupted possession, except one other breach made upon it in this time by Elijah. And this is as strong a possession as can be alledged against me.
“The religion of the World now is that Man is born to die. But from the beginning it was not so, for Man was made to live. God made not Death till Man brought it upon himself by his delinquency. Adam stood as fair for Life as Death, and fairer too, because he was in the actual possession of Life,—as Tenant thereof at the Will of God, and had an opportunity to have made that title perpetual by the Tree of Life, which stood before him with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. And here 'tis observable how the same act of man is made the condition both of his life and death: ‘put forth thy hand and pull and eat and die,’ or ‘put forth thy hand and pull and eat and live for ever.’ 'Tis not to be conceived that there was any physical virtues in either of these Trees whereby to cause life or death; but God having sanctified them by those two different names, he was obliged to make good his own characters of them, by commanding the whole Creation to act in such a manner as that Man should feel the effects of this word, according to which of the Trees he first put forth his hand. And it is yet more strange, that man having life and death set before him at the same time and place, and both to be had upon the same condition, that he should single out his own death and leave the Tree of Life untouched. And what is further strange, even after his election of death he had an interval of time before his expulsion out of Paradise, to have retrieved his fate by putting forth his hand to the Tree of Life; and yet he omitted this too!
“But by all this it is manifest that as the form or person of man in his first creation was capable of eternal life without dying, so the fall of man which happened to him after his creation hath not disabled his person from that capacity of eternal life. And therefore durst Man even then have broken through the Cherubim and flaming sword, or could he now any way come at the Tree of Life, he must yet live for ever, notwithstanding his sin committed in Paradise and his expulsion out of it. But this Tree of Life now seems lost to Man; and so he remains under the curse of that other Tree, ‘in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt die.’ Which sentence of the Law is the cause of the death of Man, and was the commencement of the Custom of Death in the World, and by the force of this Law Death has kept the possession (before admitted) to this day.