The aforesaid Dean concludes one of his Discourses with the advice of an honest heathen. Learn to be one Man; that is, learn to live and act alike. For says he, “while we act from contrary principles; sometimes give, and sometimes defraud; sometimes love and sometimes betray; sometimes are devout, and sometimes careless of God; this is to be two Men, which is a foolish aim, and always ends in loss of pains. ‘No,’ says wise Epictetus, ‘Learn to be one Man,’ thou mayest be a good man; or thou mayest be a bad man, and that to the purpose; but it is impossible that thou shouldst be both. And here the Philosopher had the happiness to fall in exactly with the notion of my text. We cannot serve two Masters.”
But in another sermon Adam Littleton says that “every man is made of three Egos, and has three Selfs in him;” and that this “appears in the reflection of Conscience upon actions of a dubious nature; whilst one Self accuses, another Self defends, and the third Self passes judgement upon what hath been so done by the man!” This he adduced as among various “mean and unworthy comparisons, whereby to show that though the mysterious doctrine of the Trinity” far exceeds our reason, there want not natural instances to illustrate it. But he adds most properly that we should neither “say or think ought of God in this kind,” without a preface of reverence and asking pardon; “for it is sufficient for us and most suitable to the mystery, so to conceive, so to discourse of God, as He himself has been pleased to make Himself known to us in his Word.”
If all theologians had been as wise, as humble and as devout as Adam Littleton, from how many heresies and evils might Christendom have been spared.
In the Doctor's own days the proposition was advanced, and not as a paradox, that a man might be in several places at the same time. Presence corporelle de l'homme en plusieurs lieux prouvée possible par les principes de la bonne Philosophie, is the title of a treatise by the Abbé de Lignac, who having been first a Jesuit, and then an Oratorian, secularized himself without departing from the principles in which he had been trained up. The object of his treatise was to show that there is nothing absurd in the doctrine of Transubstantiation. He made a distinction between man and his body, the body being always in a state of change, the man remaining the while identically the same. But how his argument that because a worm may be divided and live, the life which animated it while it was whole, continues a single life when it animates all the parts into which the body may have separated, proves his proposition, or how his proposition if proved could prove the hyper-mysterious figment of the Romish Church to be no figment, but a divine truth capable of philosophical demonstration, Œdipus himself were he raised from the dead would be unable to explain.
CHAPTER CCV.
EQUALITY OF THE SEXES,—A POINT ON WHICH IT WAS NOT EASY TO COLLECT THE DOCTOR'S OPINION.—THE SALIC LAW.—DANIEL ROGERS'S TREATISE OF MATRIMONIAL HONOUR.—MISS HATFIELD'S LETTERS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE FEMALE SEX, AND LODOVICO DOMENICHI'S DIALOGUE UPON THE NOBLENESS OF WOMEN.
Mirths and toys
To cozen time withal: for o' my troth, Sir
I can love,—I think well too,—well enough;
And think as well of women as they are,—
Pretty fantastic things, some more regardful,
And some few worth a service. I'm so honest
I wish 'em all in Heaven and you know how hard, Sir,
'Twill be to get in there with their great farthingals.
BEAUMONT and FLETCHER.
And not much easier now with their great sleeves.
AUTHOR, A.D. 1830.