Serious Reflections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe With His Vision of the Angelick World

SERIOUS REFLECTIONS DURING THE LIFE...

II. Of Reforming the Errors of Conversation.

But I leave this part as less grateful, and perhaps not more significant than what I have yet to say upon this subject; ‘tis not so absolutely material to inquire how his conversation came first to be corrupted, as how it shall be reformed or recovered. The question before us is, by what method to retrieve this miserable defection, and to bring back the nation to some tolerable degree of good manners, that morality at least may regain its authority, and virtue and sobriety be valued again as it ought to be. This, I say, is a difficult thing to direct.

– – – Facilis descensus Averno: Sed revocare gradum, . . .

Hoc opus, hie labor est, Virg. AEneid, vi.

Englished thus:

It is easy into hell to fall,

But to get back from thence is all.

The method might be easier prescribed than practised, though it cannot be perfectly prescribed neither. Something may, however, be said by way of observation; perhaps other well-wishers may hereafter throw their mites into this treasury, and some zealous reformers may at last make the attempt upon these foundations.

A strict execution of the laws against vice. We have already and are every day making very good laws to reform

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the people; but the benefit of laws consists in the executive power, which if not vigorously put forth, laws become useless, and it were better they were not made at all. I was once going to have added here a treatise, intituled, “An Essay upon the Insignificancy of Laws and Acts of Parliament in England;” but upon second thoughts, resolving to mingle no satire with my serious observations, I omitted this also. The deficiency of our laws is chiefly in the want of laws to reform the law makers, that the wheel of executive justice might be kept going. Of what use else can laws be?

An exemplary behaviour in our gentry, after whose copy the poor people generally write; not but that I acknowledge it will be harder to reform a nation than it would be to debauch it, though virtue should obtain upon custom, and become the fashion, because inclination does not stand neuter; but it would be a great step to this reformation if we could all join to discourage immorality by example. That if a man will be drunk or lewd, he shall, as a thief robs a house, do it in the dark, and be ashamed of it. If these two heads were brought to pass, I question not but reformation would come to such an height, that if a poor man happened to be drunk he should come and desire the constable to set him in the stocks for fear of a worse punishment; and if a rich man swore an oath in his passion, he should send his footman to the next justice of the peace with his fine and get a discharge for fear of being informed against and exposed.

In order to the furthering this great work it would be very necessary, if possible, to draw the picture of our mod-

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ern vices, to let mankind see by a true light what they are doing, and how ugly a phiz the mistress they court really appears with when inclination, which paints her in different colours, is taken off.

It will be impossible to bring vice out of fashion if we cannot bring men to an understanding of what it really is; but could we prevail upon a man to examine his vice, to dissect its parts, and view the anatomy of it; to see how disagreeable it is to him as a man, as a gentleman, or as a Christian; how despicable and contemptible in its highest fruition; how destructive to his senses, estate, and reputation; how dishonourable, and how beastly, in its public appearances: such a man would certainly be out of love with it; and be but mankind once out of love with vice, the reformation is half brought to pass.

I shall not pretend to invade the province of the learned, nor offer one argument from Scripture or Providence; for I am supposed to be talking to men that doubt or deny them both. Divinity is not my talent, nor ever like to be my profession; the charge of priestcraft and schoolmen would not lie against me; besides, it is not the way of talking that the world relishes at this time; in a word, talking Scripture is out of fashion. But I must crave leave to tell my reader that if there were no God or Providence, devil or future state, yet they ought not to be drunken and lewd, passionate, revengeful, or immoral; ‘tis so unnatural, so unruly, so ungenteel, so foolish and foppish, that no wise man, as a man, can

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justify it so much as to his own reason or the memory of his ancestors. I suppose myself talking to men that have nothing to do with God, and desire He should have nothing to do with them; and yet even to such a vicious conversation, looked on without the gust of inclination, would appear too brutish to be meddled with, if we will but choose like men, not to say like Christians. Virtue and morality is more agreeable to human nature, more manly than vice and intemperance; ‘tis more suitable to all the ends of life, to the being of society, to the public peace of families, as well as nations. Mankind would rather be virtuous than vicious, if they were to choose only for their own ease and convenience. Vice tends to oppression, war, and confusion; virtue is peaceable and honest; vice is a poison to society; no man is safe if men have neither sobriety nor honesty, for the innocent will be robbed by the thief, ravished by the lewd, and murdered by the drunkard.

It might not be a needless digression if I should examine here whether whoring and drunkenness be not the two mother sins of the times, the spring and original of all our fashionable vices. I distinguish this because other sins, as murders, thefts, rapes, and the like, are now come so much in vogue, we are content the laws should be executed for them, but should think it very hard a man should be hanged for whoring or transported for being drunk.

I would not have any of our gentlemen think that my laying the charge of our debauchery on the examples of the

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gods, has taken off anything of the blame from those who have industriously propagated the spreading evil among their tenants and neighbours, by their own vicious example; and I could turn the whole observation into a satire on the manners of our gentlemen, and describe with what easiness our magistrates let fall the reins of their authority, and connive at the practice of all manner of intemperance and excess among the people; with what eagerness the poor countrymen are called in to be made drunk upon every occasion; with what contempt any person is looked upon either in town or country, that either will not be drunk, or cannot bear an excessive quantity of wine; how our common mirth is filled with songs and poems, recommending drunkenness and lewdness; and rampant vice rides riot through the nation. But, as above, I avoid satire; I shall endeavour to treat this foul subject in as civil terms as the case will bear, and only examine general conversation in particular heads, with some vulgar errors of behaviour which are crept in, and which seem authorised by custom.

III. Of Atheistical and Profane Discourse.

God Almighty Himself is the least beholding to this age of any that ever was from the beginning of time; for that being arrived to a degree of knowledge superior to all that went before us, or at least fancying it to be so, whereby the greater glory might accrue to Himself, the Author of all wisdom, that every gift, the brightest of all the heavenly bless-

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ings, is made use of to put the greatest contempt upon His majesty that mankind is capable of – to deny His essence; such an affront that the devils themselves never had the impudence to suggest to the world till they found man arrived to a degree of hardness fit for something never done before. All the heathen nations in the world came short of this; the most refined philosophers owned a first cause of all things, and that something was superior, whose influence governed, and whose being was sacred and to be adored. The devil himself, who is allowed to be full of enmity against the Supreme Being, has often set up himself to be worshipped as a God, but never prompted the most barbarous nations to deny the being of a God; and ‘tis thought that even the devil himself believed the notion was too absurd to be imposed upon the world. But our age is even with him for his folly, for since they cannot get him to join in the denial of a God they will deny his devilship too, and have neither one nor other.

‘Tis worth observation, after the most convincing arguments that nature and reason can produce for the existence of a deity, what weak, foolish, ridiculous shifts the most refined of our atheistical disputants fly to in defence of their notion, with what senseless pains they labour to reason themselves into an opinion which their own constitution, nature, and way of living give the lie to every moment; with how little consistency they solve all the other phenomena of nature and creation; that when in all other points they are capable of arguing strenuously, and are not to be satisfied but with strength of reason and sound argument, here

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they admit sophisms, delusive suppositions, and miserable shams and pretences to prevail upon their own judgments. This is touched at in the following lines upon the system of Prometheus, which I could not omit upon this occasion, relating to the heathens’ ignorance in the great doctrine of first causes:

The great Promethean artist, poets say, First made the model of a man in clay,

Contrived the form of parts, and when he had done, Stole vital heat from the prolifi c sun;

But not a poet tells us to this day

Who made Prometheus fi rst, and who the clay, Who gave the great prolifi c to the sun,

And where the first productive work begun.

Also Epicurus, his philosophy will satisfy some people, who fancy the world was made by a strange fortuitous conjunction of atoms, without any pre-existent influence, or without any immediate power, which Mr. Creech very well translates thus:

But some have dreamt of atoms strangely hurled Into the decent order of the world,

And so by chance combined, from whence began The earth, the heaven, the sea, and beast, and man.

To which I crave leave to subjoin one complement, by way of confutation of this folly:

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Forgetting fi rst that something must bestow

Existence on those atoms that did so.

The arguments for the existence of a deity are so many, so nicely handled, and so unanswerable, that ‘tis needless to attempt anything that way; no man in his wits needs any further demonstration of it than what he may find within himself, nor is it any part of the work I am upon; I have only a few things to ask of our modern atheists.

1. Whether their more serious thoughts do not reflect upon them in the very act, and give the lie to their arguments. My Lord Rochester, who was arrived to an extraordinary pitch in this infernal learning, acknowledged it on his deathbed; the sense nature has upon her of the certainty of this great truth, will give some convulsions at so horrid an act.

Nature pays homage with a trembling bow, And conscious men but faintly disallow; The secret trepidation racks the soul,

And while he says, no God, replies, “Thou fool.”

2. I would ask the most confident atheist, what assurance he has of the negative, and what a risk he runs if he should be mistaken? This we are sure of, if we want demonstration to prove the being of a God, they are much more at a loss for a demonstration to prove the negative. Now, no man can answer it to his prudence, to take the risk they run, upon

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an uncertain supposititious notion; for if there be such a thing as a First Cause, which we call God, they have very little reason to expect much from Him who have made it their business to affront Him by denying His existence. Nor have they acted in their denial like wise men, for they have not used so much as the caution of good manners; but as if they were as sure of His nonentity as of the strongest demonstration, they have been witty upon the thing, and made a jest of the supposition, turned all matters of faith into ridicule, burlesqued upon religion itself, and made ballads and songs on the Bible. Thus Rochester has left us a long lewd song, beginning thus:

Religion’s a politic cheat,

Made up of many a fable;

Ne’er trouble the wise or the great,

But only amuses the rabble.

Now, I am not in this discourse entering into any of the arguments in these grand questions on one side or other that would be to make this work a collection of polemics; nor am I casuist enough for such a work – but I am observing or remarking upon the wickedness of the treating these subjects with levity and ignorance in the common road of conversation.

Methinks these gentlemen act with more courage than discretion; for if it should happen at last that there should be a God, and that He has the power of rewards and punish-

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ments in His hand, as He must have or cease to be almighty, they are but in an ill case:

If it should so fall out, as who can tell, But there may be a God, a heaven, a hell, Mankind had best consider well for fear,

‘T should be too late when their mistakes appear.

Nor do they, in my opinion, discover any great wit in it; there is, if I might pass for a judge, something flat, something that shocks the fancy, in all the satire upon religion that ever I saw; as if the muse were not so much an atheist as the poet, but baulks the hint, and could not favour a blasphemous flight with so much freedom and spirit that at other times it has shown; which is a notice that there is a tacit sense of the Deity, though they pretend to deny it, lodged in the understanding; that it is not stifled without some difficulty, and struggles hard with the fancy, when the party strives to be more than ordinarily insolent with his Maker.

In the next place, as ‘tis one of the worst immoralities of conversation when it is profane, so blasphemy is the extreme of profaneness; you cannot come Into company with an atheist but you have it in his common discourse; he is always putting some banter or foolish pun upon religion, affronting the invisible Power, or ridiculing his Maker; all his wit runs out into it, as all diseases run into the plague in

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