LETTER V.*

For heaven virtue can alone prepare;
"Vice would find herself unhappy there."

OLD FRIEND,

I REMEMBER to have read twenty years since, I believe in a translation of one of the Classics, of a man that was suspected of having mur dered his father; but as no positive evidence was advanced against him, it was thought unjust to punish him. In order to be more satisfied in the affair, a person, unknown to him, was ordered to pay close attention to him every time he went to sleep, which was accordingly done; and on this person's reporting that the suspected man slept perfectly sound, it was concluded that he could not have murdered his father.

I was led to the recollection of the above story by some part of my last letter to you, reflecting on the surprise it possibly might give you on reading of it. I was by a train of reasoning brought to conclude (as I have no faith in a death bed repentance) that if a person cannot sleep soundly who has been gulty of any horrid crime, he certainly cannot die in peace, but will be tormented by his guilty conscience so that if at that awful period he is in good humour and can laugh, like Ann

*This letter was wrote when I only admitted the truth of natural religion.-The letter alluded to in this is omitted.

Boleyn and others mentioned in my last, I, with the apostle, "irust that he hath a good con science."

But my dear friend, if because I could wish to die in a perfect good humour, like the emperor Augustus, you think me a mere trifler, and an enemy to serious thoughts, you never was more mistaken, as no man can think more gravely on serious subjects than I do at times, and that fre ea quently; but then I insist on it, that a time of Ch sickness, when the body is overwhelmed with pain and disorders, is not a suitable time for repentance; much less should that important work be deferred to a death-bed. Nothing surprises me more than to hear or read that rational beings, or dsome who would be thought such, talk of making their peace with Heaven on their death-bed.

The greatest offenders against the laws of society, in general shew great contrition when brought to the gallows; yet no one is so ignorant as to believe that their repentance is of that kind as, were their lives spared, would prevent them from committing other daring offences. How then can we imagine that the heart of a villain who has the good luck to escape the gallows, can be totally nchanged on his death-bed.

I wish from my soul that our dramatic and novel writers had not given so many deep wounds to morality as, from observation, I have great reason to think they have done by their frequent insinuations of the efficacy of a few days, sometimes a few hours repentance or remorse. Surely, in all such productions, every villain and immoral char

acter should be "sent to his account with all his imperfections on his head:" for it is scarcely pos sible for the devil himself to insinuate any ideas more destructive to moral rectitude than the sufficiency of remorse of conscience on a death-bed.

Homer relates the death of Elpenor in a very concise manner; and to Christians it must appear awful:

Full headlong from the roof the sleeper fell,
And snapp'd his spinal joint and wak'd in hell.

POPE'S ODYSEY:

I have often been puzzled to find out where those authors of plays and novels, (some of whom are very respectable, and deserve the esteem of the community) learned their notions of repentance. They did not learn them from the scriptures, for in them repentance is made to consist of an entire change of heart and life. Natural religion teaches the same doctrine. By the works of the learned we find that the viedam of the Persians, the sacred books of the ancient Bramins, the morals of Confucius, all hold forth the same notions in respect to repentance. The heathen philosophers taught the same doctrine; Plato says, that such men as have only committed venial sins, must repent all their lives afterwards; and even though they spend the remainder of their lives in repentance, yet that they must of necessity be cast into Tartarus for a time. This great philosopher, in his Commonwealth, and also in his treatise of the Immortality of the Soul, supposes that souls, both good and bad, carry their good or evil

dispositions with them into the other world; or in other words, that every man carries the seeds of eternal happiness or misery in his own mind: so that if we go into the other world with evil passions unmortified, they will not only be far more violent than now, but our perception of them will be pure and unalloyed by any intermixture of enjoyment.

Dr. Scott, in the three first chapters of his Christian Life, has pursued the Platonic doctrine through all its consequences. It is well worth the attention even of a philosopher. Mr. Boyd has given us an excellent summary view of the Platonic doctrine with respect to a future state, at the end of his translation of Dante's Inferno: I will give you a few short extracts.

"The souls of men, whenever they leave the body, doubtless associate with spirits like themselves."

"We cannot see how spirits act upon each other, yet there is no doubt but the plagues inflicted by spirits upon spirits are as immediate as those inflicted by body upon body."

"What woeful society must that be? where all trust and confidence is banished, and every one stands upon his guard, tortured with eternal vigilance of surrounding mischiefs! when all his employment is diabolical fraud. Their society is like the monster Scylla, whom the poet speaks of, whose inferior parts were a company of dogs continually snarling and quarrelling among themselves, and yet inseparable from each other, as being parts of the same substance.”

As the punishment arises in a great degree from the acquired habit, it must last as long as the existence of the criminal."

In every act of virtue there is an imperfect union of the soul with God, and some degree of the pleasure of heaven. When habit has made the exercise of virtue delightful, we shall find ourselves under the central force of heaven, sweetly drawn along by the powerful magnetism of its joy and pleasure."

From every point of view, I think it is evident that repentance does not consist in a momentary sorrow, but in a change of disposition and life.

I must confess that I cannot help thinking, that heaven would be a strange sort of a place if every rascal, knave, and fool were permitted to go there, who have on their death-bed, experienced remorse of conscience. Such wretches as these have made a hell of this world to all connected with them; and are they to make a hell of heaven also? Can one conceive a worse hell than it would be for a perfectly honest man to live eternally with a rogue, or a virtuous woman with an old bawd?

We laugh when we read of the Indians in the East, firmly believing that if they can but die with a cow's tail in their hand, they are quite sure of going to heaven; but are not our notions to the full as absurd as theirs? Is our death-bed repentance any thing more than a cow's tail in our band?

"It must be allowed that it is the height of presumption to set bounds to the mercies of God; but may it not give encouragement to vice, tổ flatter ourselves with the expectation of pardon