The Doctor's feelings were in unison with both these passages;—with the former concerning the quiet age in which it was his fortune to flourish; and with the latter in that it was his fortune to flourish in the shade. “It is with times,” says Lord Bacon, “as it is with ways; some are more up hill and down hill, and some are more flat and plain; and the one is better for the liver, and the other for the writer.”
He assented also to the Christian-Platonist of Bemerton when he asked, “to what purpose should a man be very earnest in the pursuit of Fame? He must shortly die, and so must those too who admire him.” But nothing could be more opposed to his way of thinking than what follows in that philosopher,—“Nay, I could almost say, to what purpose should a man lay himself out upon study and drudge so laboriously in the mines of learning? He is no sooner a little wiser than his brethren, but Death thinks him ripe for his sickle; and for aught we know, after all his pains and industry, in the next world, an ideot, or a mechanic will be as forward as he.” In the same spirit Horace Walpole said in his old age, “What is knowledge to me, who stand on the verge, and must leave my old stores as well as what I may add to them,—and how little could that be!”
When Johnson was told that Percy was uneasy at the thought of leaving his house, his study, his books—when he should die,—he replied—“a man need not be uneasy on these grounds, for as he will retain his consciousness, he may say with the Philosopher, omnia mea mecum porto.”
“Let attention,” says the thoughtful John Miller in his Bampton Lectures, which deserve to be side by side with those of the lamented Van Mildert, “let attention be requested to what seems here an accessory sign of the adaptation of all our heavenly Father's dealings to that which he ‘knows to be in man’—I mean his merciful shortening of the term of this present natural life, subsequently to the period when all-seeing justice had been compelled to destroy the old world for its disobedience.
“I call it merciful, because, though we can conceive no length of day which could enable man with his present faculties to exhaust all that is made subject to his intellect, yet observing the scarcely credible rapidity of some minds and the no less wonderful retention of others, we may well conceive a far severer, nay too severe a test of resignation and patience to arise from length of years. To learn is pleasant; but to be ‘ever learning, and never able to come to sure knowledge of the truth,’ (if it were only in matters of lawful and curious and ardent speculation,) is a condition which we may well imagine to grow wearisome by too great length of time. ‘Hope delayed’ might well ‘make the heart sick’ in many such cases. We may find an infidel amusing himself on the brink of the grave with many imaginary wishes for a little longer respite, that he might witness the result of this or that speculation; but I am persuaded that the heart which really loves knowledge most truly and most wisely will be affected very differently. From every fresh addition to its store (as far as concerns itself,) it will only derive increase to that desire wherewith it longs to become disentangled altogether from a state of imperfection, and to be present in the fulness of that light, wherein ‘every thing that is in part shall be done away.’ Here, then, in one of the most interesting and most important of all points (the shortening of human life) we find a representation in Scripture which may be accounted favourable to its credibility and divine authority on the safest grounds of reason and experience. For certainly, as to the bare matter of fact, such representation corresponds in the strictest manner (as far as we have known and have seen) with the state of life as at present existing; and accepting it as true, we can perceive at once, a satisfactory explanation of it by referring it, as a provision for man's well being, to the wisdom and mercy of an Omnipotent Spirit who knew, and knows ‘what is in man.’”
FRAGMENT OF SIXTH VOLUME.
Reader, we are about to enter upon the sixth volume of this our Opus; and as it is written in the forms of Herkeru, Verily the eye of Hope is upon the high road of Expectation.