Dying Testimonies of Infidels.
DYING testimonies show the folly of endeavoring to deceive ourselves in respect to our relations to God. Death corrects our known errors, it crushes our speculative reasonings, and allows our innate consciousness of truth to assert its authority. As death approaches, a man reviews his life, and his motives and conduct are brought into judgment before the tribunal of his conscience; he cannot flee from himself; he cannot stifle his convictions of the fas and nefas of the motives that have governed his behavior; and if, to palliate irregularities in his moral conduct, he has called error truth, he will find it a fearful thing to be undeceived. John Wilmot, Lord Rochester, was an accomplished nobleman and a favorite of Charles II. He became dissolute, a votary to the wine-cup and to sensual pleasure, and a defender of infidelity. He confessed to Dr. Burnet that, for five years, his dissipation was so excessive that he was at no time master of himself. The age of thirty-one found him with his physical powers ruined, and his prospects of life precarious. His infidel principles forsook him, and, trembling in view of future punishment, he turned penitently to God. During his protracted illness, he published a confession of his errors, declaring that "he left to the world this last declaration, which he delivered in the presence of the great God, who knows the secrets of all hearts, and before whom he was preparing to be judged, that, from the bottom of his soul, he detested and abhorred the whole course of his former wicked life." "O remember," he said to a friend who visited him on his death-bed, "that you contemn God no more. He is an avenging God, and will visit you for your sins, and will, I hope, touch your conscience sooner or later, as he has done mine. You and I have been friends and sinners together a great while, and, therefore, I am the more free with you. We have been all mistaken in our conceits and opinions; our persuasions have been false and groundless. Therefore, God grant you repentance." "I am abandoned by God and man!" exclaimed Voltaire in his last sickness. After a long exile, he had returned to Paris in triumph. His name was the signal for enthusiasm. He had even feared that he should expire amid the acclamations which his presence called forth at the theater. But neither the shout of the populace, nor the assurance of his atheistical friends, could stay his faith on his own philosophy in the prospect of the coming judgment. He renounced his opinions, but died in the expectation of future retribution. "Guenard has said it! Guenard has said it!" mournfully said Cardinal Mazarin, alluding to the declaration of his physician that he must die. He was heard to exclaim, "Oh, my poor soul, what will become of thee? Whither wilt thou go?" To the queen-dowager of France he said, "Madame, your favors have undone me. Were I to live again, I would be a monk rather than courtier." Such were the sober reflections of an ecclesiastic whose boundless ambition had overruled his sense of moral obligation, and whose adroit policy had virtually placed in his hands the scepter of France. But Mazarin, though awakened to his situation, was too much joined to his politics and pleasures to turn manfully to religion. Cards were one of his last amusements; and, when dying, he ordered himself to be rouged and dressed, that he might receive the flattery of his courtiers on his apparent recovery. There are hours of sober thought, and times of imminent peril, when the soul seems to forecast its dying hour—when it starts at the view of its conscious errors, and utters, as from dying lips, its settled convictions. Hobbes was subject to the most gloomy reflections, and was thrown into a state of terror if left alone in the dark. He declared, on one occasion, that, had he the whole world to dispose of, he would give it for a single day to live. He died with the declaration that he was taking a leap in the dark. Paine, in his last sickness, would cry out with affright if left alone night or day. Volney, after deriding religion, while sailing on Lake Ontario, was thrown into a state of consternation very inconsistent with his philosophy, as a sudden storm exposed him to imminent peril. Shelley, during a storm at sea, was stupefied with terror; and, when the danger was past, declared to Lord Byron that he had tasted so much of the bitterness of death, that, in the future, he should entertain doubts of his own creed. The poet, Churchill, whose life was marked by apostasy from religion and by excessive dissipation, thus writes in a sober hour: "Look back! a thought which borders on despair,
Which human nature must but cannot bear.
'Tis not the babbling of a busy world,
Where praise and censure are at random hurled,
Which can the meanest of my thoughts control,
Or shake one settled purpose of my soul:
Free and at large might their wild curses roam,
If all, if all, alas, were well at home.
No; 'tis the tale which angry conscience tells,
When she with more than tragic horror swells
Each circumstance of guilt; when stern, but true,
She brings bad actions forth into review.
And, like the dread handwriting on the wall,
Bids late remorse awake to reason's call;
Armed at all points, bids scorpion vengeance pass,
And to the mind holds up reflection's glass—
The mind, which, starting, heaves the heartfelt groan
And hates that form she knows to be her own." There is something mournful in the declaration of Gibbon, on the night he completed the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. "It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen, I took several turns in a berceau, or covered walk of acacias, which commands a prospect of the country, the lake, and the mountains. The air was temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all Nature was silent. I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an agreeable companion, and that, whatsoever might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." Still more gloomy is the declaration of Hume, on reviewing his life and works: "I am at first affrighted and confounded by the forlorn solitude in which I am placed by my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange, uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expelled all human commerce, and left utterly abandoned and disconsolate. Fain would I run into the crowd for shelter and warmth, but cannot prevail upon myself to mix with such deformity. I call upon others to join with me to make a company apart, but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads the storm that beats upon me from every side. When I look abroad, I foresee on every side dispute, contradiction, anger, calumny, and detraction. When I turn my eye inward, I find nothing but doubt and ignorance."—Independent.