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

SERIOUS REFLECTIONS DURING THE LIFE...

a time of infection, and you must have patience to hear it or quarrel with him.

Below these we have a sort of people who will acknowledge a God, but he must be such a one as they please to make him; a fine, well-bred, good-natured, gentleman -like deity, that cannot have the heart to damn any of his creatures to an eternal punishment, nor could not be so weak as to let the Jews crucify his own son. These men expose religion, and all the doctrines of repentance, and faith in Christ, with all the means of a Christian salvation, as matter of banter and ridicule. The Bible, they say, is a good history in most parts, but the story of our Saviour they look upon as a mere novel, and the miracles of the New Testament as a legend of priestcraft.

Further, besides these, we have Arians and Socinians, the disciples of an ancient heretic who went out of the church always at the singing the Gloria Patri, that he might be out of the noise, and would sit down at the doxology of the prayers, to note his disowning the godhead of Jesus Christ.

These are iniquities, as Job said, should be punished by the judges (chap. xxii. ver. 20), and these are the things which have given such a stroke to the ruin of the nation’s morals; for no method can be so direct to prepare people for all sorts of wickedness as to persuade them out of a belief of any Supreme Power to restrain them. Make a man once cease to believe a God, and he has nothing left to limit his appetite but mere philosophy; if there is no supreme judicature, he must be his own judge and his own law, and will be

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so; the notion of hell, devil, and infernal spirits are empty things, and have nothing of terror in them, if the belief of a Power superior to them be obliterated.

But to bring this particular case nearer to the point of conversation, the errors of which lie before me: though we live in an age where these horrid degrees of impiety are too much practised, yet we live in a place where religion is professed, the name of God owned and worshipped, religion and the doctrines of Christianity established; and as it is so, it ought as much to be preserved by the civil power from the horrid invasion of atheists, deists, and heretics, as the public peace ought to be defended against freebooters, thieves, and invaders.

‘Tis very improbable any reformation of manners should be brought to pass, if the debauching the religious principles of the nation goes on with an unrestrained liberty. How incongruous is it to the decoration * of government, that a man shall be punished for drunkenness and set in the stocks for swearing, but shall have liberty to deny the God of heaven and dispute against the very sum and substance of the Christian doctrine, shall banter the Scripture and make ballads of the Pentateuch, turn all the principles of religion – the salvation of the soul, the death of our Saviour, and the revelation of the Gospel – into ridicule. And shall we pretend to reformation of manners and suppressing immoralities, while such as this is the general mixture of conversation? If a man talk against the government, or speak scurrilously of the king, he is had to the Old Bailey, and from thence to

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the pillory or whip ping-post, and it is fit it should be so; but he may speak treason against the Majesty of heaven, deny the godhead of His Redeemer, and make a jest of the Holy Ghost – and thus affront the Power we all adore – and yet pass with impunity. Perhaps some in the company may have courage enough to blame him, and vindicate their religion with a “ Why do you talk so? “ but where is the man or the magistrate that ever vindicated the honour of his Maker with a resentment becoming the crime? If a man give the lie to a gentleman in company he takes it as an affront, flies into a passion, quarrels, fights, and perhaps murders him; nay, some have done it for an absent friend whom they have heard abused; but where is the gentleman that ever thought himself so much concerned in the quarrel of his Maker but that he could hear Him affronted, His being denied, the lie given to His divine authority, nay, to His divine being, and all His command ridiculed and exposed, without any motion of spirit to punish the insolence of the party, and without drawing his sword in the quarrel or letting him know he does not like it? Methinks I need not make an apology for this, as if I meant that quarrelling and fighting were a proper practice in the case; the law does not admit it in any case, nor is it reasonable it should; and God Almighty is far from desiring us to run any risk in His service. But I choose to bring the cases into a parallel, to signify that I think it is a vulgar error in our behaviour not to show our resentment when we hear the honour and essence of God slighted and denied, His majesty abused, and religion bantered and ridiculed in common discourses. I think it would be very

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reasonable to tell a gentleman he wants manners when he talks reproachfully of his Maker, and to use him scurvily if he resented it. It would very well become a man of quality to cane a lewd fop, or kick him downstairs, when his insolence took a loose at religion in his company, else men may be bullied out of their Christianity and lampooned into profaneness, for fear of being counted fools. Besides, it is in this as in all other like cases; he that will talk atheistically in my company, either believes me to be an atheist like himself, or ventures to impose upon me; and by imposing upon me, either accounts me a fool that cannot tell when I am put upon, or a coward that dare not resent it.

Upon which account, even in good manners, it ought to be avoided; for it cannot be introduced into any part of conversation where the company are not all alike, without the greatest affront upon the rest that can be offered them.

IV. Of Lewd and Immodest Discourse.

Talking bawdy, that sodomy of the tongue, has the most of ill manners and the least of a gentleman in it of any part of common discourse. Sir George Mackenzie has very handsomely exposed it in its proper colours; but it may not be an intrenchment at all upon his province to say something to it in these observations.

This part is the peculiar practice of such persons as are hardened to a degree beyond other men, proficients in debauchery, whose lives are so continually devoted to lewd-

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ness, that their mouths cannot contain it; who can govern their tongues no better than their tails, and are willing to be thought what really they are. In these it is neither so strange nor so much a crime as in others; these are persons not to be reclaimed. This part of my observation is not designed for their use; they are not to be talked out of their vice; they must go on and run their length. Nothing but a gaol or an hospital ever brings them to a reformation; they repent sometimes in that emblem of hell, a fluxing house, and, under the surgeon’s hands, wish a little they had been wiser; but they follow one sin with another, till their carcass stinks as bad as their discourse, and the body becomes too nasty for the soul to stay any longer in it. From these no discourse is to be expected but what is agreeable to the tenor of their lives; for then to talk otherwise would be strained and eccentric, and become them as little as it would be tedious to them; but for a gentleman, a man of seeming modesty and a man of behaviour, not arrived to that class in the devil’s school, for such a one to mix his discourse with lewd and filthy expressions, has something in it of a figure which intends more than is expressed.

Either we must believe such a one to be very lewd in his practice, or else, that not being able yet to arrive to such a degree of wickedness as he desires, he would supply that defect with a cheat, and persuade you to believe he is really worse than he is.

Which of these two characters I would choose to wear I cannot tell, for he that desires to be worse than he thinks he

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is, is certainly as bad as he desires to be; and he that is so bad as to let fly the excrescences of it at his mouth, is as wicked as the devil can in reason desire of him.

But I descend from the wickedness to the in decency of the matter; its being a sin against God is not so much the present argument as its being unmannerly – a sin against breeding and society, a breach of behaviour, and a saucy, insolent affront to all the company.

I do not deny but that modesty, as it respects the covering our bodies, was at first an effect of the fall of our parents into crime, and is therefore said still to be the consequences of criminal nature, and no virtue in itself, because no part of the body had been unfit to be exposed if vice had not made the distinction necessary.

But from this very argument lewd discourse appears to be a sin against custom and decency; for why must the tongue industriously expose things and actions at which Nature blushes, and which custom, let the original be what it will, has dedicated to privacy and retirement? What if it be true that shame is the consequence of sin, and that modesty is not an original virtue; it cannot but be allowed that sin has thereby brought us to a necessity of making modesty be a virtue, and sin would have a double influence upon us if, after it had made us ashamed, it should make us not ashamed again.

‘Tis, in my opinion, a mistake when we say sin was the immediate cause of shame; ‘twas sin indeed gave a nudity to

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our natures and actions; the innocence, which served as a glory and covering, being gone, then shame came in as the effect of the conscious sinner; so the text says, they knew that they were naked. Shame was the effect of nakedness, as nakedness was the effect of sin.

From hence, then, I argue, and this is the reason of my naming it, that to be ashamed of our nakedness is a to-

ken of our wisdom and a monument of our just sense of the first sin that made it so, and as much a duty now as any other part of our repentance.

To give the tongue then a liberty in that which there is so much reason to blush at, argues no sense of the original degeneracy. Where is the man that partakes not of Adam’s fall, has no vicious contracted habit and nature conveyed to him from his grand predecessor? Let him come forth, let him go naked and live by himself, and let his posterity partake of his innocence; his tongue cannot offend, nothing can be indecent for him to say, nothing uncomely for him to see.

But if these gentlemen think it proper to cover their nakedness with their clothes, methinks they should not be always uncovering it again with their tongues; if there are some needful things which Nature requires to be done in secret, and which they by inclination choose to act in private, what reason can they give for speaking of them in public?

There is a strange incongruity in the behaviour of these people, that they fill their mouths with the foul repetition

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of actions and things which their own practising in private condemns them for, nay, which they would be ashamed to do in public; such men ought to act the common requirements of Nature in the most publickest places of the streets, bring their wives or whores to the exchange and to the mar- ket-places, and lie with them in the street, or else hold their tongues, and let their mouths have no more the stench of their vices in public than their actions.

And why, of all the rest of the parts of life, must the tongue take a peculiar licence to revel thus upon Nature, as if she had a mind to reproach her with the infirmities she labours under? The customs we are obliged to, though they are clogs upon Nature and a badge of original defection, yet neither is there anything so odious or so burdensome that these gentlemen should triumph over the nurse that brought them up.

Take the lewdest and most vicious wretch that ever gave his tongue a loose in this hateful practice, and turn him about to his mother, you shall hardly prevail upon him to talk his lewd language to her; there is something nauseous and surfeiting in that thought. This talking bawdy is like a man going to debauch his own mother; for it is raking into the arcana and exposing the nakedness of Nature, the common mother of us all.

If, as a famous man of wit pretended, lying with a woman was the homeliest thing that man can do, ‘tis much more

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true that talking of it is the homeliest thing that man can say.

Nor is there to me any jest in these things, any appearance of mirth. There may be some pleasure in wicked actions, as the world rates pleasure, but I must profess ‘tis dull, and for want of other more regular tastes that there should be pleasure in the discourse. ‘Tis a profaning of Nature, and bringing forth those things she has hallowed to secrecy and retirement to the scandalous indecency of public banter and jest.

But men, who have always something to say for their folly, tell us ‘tis custom only which has made any of these things uncommon, and there ‘s no sin in speaking that which there was no sin in doing.

Let us grant them that custom only has done this; but if custom has made these things uncommon, and concealed, or, at least, banished them from the voice of conversation, ‘tis a sin then against custom to expose them again. Lawful customs become allowed virtues, and ought to be preserved. Custom is a good reason in such concealments; if custom has locked them up, let them remain so, at least, till you can give a better reason for calling them abroad again than custom has given for restraining them. Custom has made these things uncommon, because that sin which first made Nature naked left her so captivated by some of her parts more than others, that she could not but blush at those where sin

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had taken up its peculiar residence. Now, as I noted before, no man can with any tolerable satisfaction expose the parts till he has first extracted and separated the sin which, having possessed them, covered them at first with shame. He that can do this may go naked and talk anything.

And, for the same reason, no man can justify talking lewdly but he that at the same time throws away his clothes, for to cover himself with his hands and uncover himself with his tongue are contradictions in their own nature, and one condemns the other.

He that scorns the decency of words should also scorn the decency of clothes, let his body be as bald as his discourse, and let him scorn the shame of one as well as the shame of the other.

It is no sin, they say, to talk of what it is no sin to do; and, I may add, it is no sin at all to show what it is no sin to describe. Why is the eye to be less offended than the ear, since both are but the common organs of the understanding?

But the weather and inconveniences of the climate are urged for clothing our bodies, and I urge decency and good manners for the government of our tongues; and let any one contend it with me that thinks he can prove that the obligation of the first is greater than the obligation of the last.

Much more might be said to this, but I make but an essay, and am unwilling to run out into a long discourse.

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