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

SERIOUS REFLECTIONS DURING THE LIFE...

but then they judge by customs, oral tradition, or immediate opinion, and execute the sentence immediately, without room or time to reflect upon the justice of it, or to consider of mitigations, as in all Christian countries is practised, and as the sense of human frailty would direct.

But let me come to their mechanics, in which their ingenuity is so much cried up. I affirm there is little or nothing sufficient to build the mighty opinion we have of them upon, but what is founded upon the comparisons which we make between them and other pagan nations, or proceeds from the wonder which we make that they should have any knowledge of mechanic arts, because we find the remote inhabitants of Africa and America so grossly ignorant and so entirely destitute in such things; whereas we do not consider that the Chinese inhabit the continent of Asia, and though they are separated by deserts and wildernesses, yet they are a continuous continent of land with the parts of the world once inhabited by the politer Medes, Persians, and Grecians; that the first ideas of mechanic arts were probably received by them from the Persians, Assyrians, and the banished transplanted Israelites, who are said to be carried into the regions of Parthia and the borders of Karakathie, from whence they are also said to have communicated arts, and especially handicraft, in which the Israelites excelled, to the inhabitants of all those countries, and, consequently, in time to those beyond them.

But let them be received from whom they will, and how long ago soever, let us but compare the improvement they

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have made with what others have made; and, except in things peculiar to themselves, by their climate, we shall find the utmost of their ingenuity amounts but to a very trifle, and that they are outdone even in the best of their works by our ordinary artists, whose imitations exceed their originals beyond all comparison.

For example, they have gunpowder and guns, whether they have learned to make them by direction of Europeans, which is most likely, or that they found it out by mere strength of invention, as some would advance, though without certainty, in their favour — be it which it will, as I say, it matters not much, their powder is of no strength for the needful operations of sieges, mines, batteries, no, nor for shooting of birds, as ours is, without great quantities put together; their guns are rather an ostentation than for execution, clumsy, heavy, and illmade; neither have they arrived to any tolerable degree of knowledge in the art of gunnery or engineering. They have no bombs, carcasses, hand-grenades; their artificial fireworks are in no degree comparable or to be named with ours; nor have they arrived to anything in the military skill in marshalling armies, handling arms, discipline, and the exercise in the field as the Europeans have; all which is depending on the improvement of firearms, &c., in which, if they have had the use of gunpowder so many ages as some dream, they must be unaccountable blockheads that they have made no farther improvement; and if it is but lately, they are yet apparently dull enough in the managing of it, at least compared to what ought

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to be expected of an ingenious people, such as our people cry them up to be.

I might go from this to their navigation, in which it is true they outdo most of their neighbours; but what is all their skill in sailing compared to ours? Whither do they go? and how manage the little and foolish barks and junks they have? What would they do with them to traverse the great Indian, American, or Atlantic oceans? What ships, what sailors, what poor, awkward, and ignorant doings are there among them at sea! And when our people hire any of them, as sometimes they are obliged to do, how do our sailors kick them about, as a parcel of clumsy, ignorant, unhandy fellows!

Then for building of ships, what are they? and what are they able to do towards the glorious art of building a large man-of-war? It is out of doubt with me, that all the people of China could not build such a ship as the “Royal Sovereign”” in a hundred years; no, not though she was there for them to look at and take pattern by.

I might go on to abundance more things, such as painting, making glasses, making clocks and watches, making bone-lace, framework knitting; all of which, except the two first, they know little or nothing; and of the two first nothing compared to what is done in Europe.

The height of their ingenuity, and for which we admire them with more colour of cause than in other things, is their

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porcelain or earthenware work, which, in a word, is more due to the excellent composition of the earth they make them of, and which is their peculiar, than to the workmanship; in which, if we had the same clay, we should soon outdo them as much as we do in other things. The next art is their manufacturing in fine silks, cotton, herbs, gold, and silver, in which they have nothing but what is in common with our ordinary poor weavers.

The next mechanic art is their lacquering, which is just, as in their China ware, a peculiar to their country, in the materials, not at all in the workmanship; and as for the cabinet-work of it they are manifestly outdone by us; and abundance is every year sent thither framed and made in England, and only lacquered in China, to be returned to us.

I might run the like parallel through most of the things these people excel in, which would all appear to be so deficient as would render all their famed wisdom and capacity most scandalously imperfect. But I am not so much upon their cunning in arts as upon their absurdity and ridiculous folly in religious matters, and in which I think the rudest barbarians outdo them.

From this wise nation we have a vast extent of ground, near two thousand miles in breadth, partly under the Chinese government, partly under the Muscovite, but inhabited by Tartars of Mongol Tartary, Karakathie, Siberian, and Samoiedes pagans, whose idols are almost as hideous as the Chinese’s, and whose

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SERIOUS REFLECTIONS DURING THE LIFE...

religion is all Nature — and not only so, but Nature under the greatest degeneracy, and next to brutal. Father le Comte gives us the pictures of some of their house idols, and an account of their worship; and this lasts, as I have observed, to within a few days of Archangel. So that, in a word, from the mouth of the Straits, that is to say, from Sallee over to Caribbee, from thence round Africa by the Cape of Good Hope, across the vast Indian Ocean, and upon all the coast of it, about by Malacca and Sumatra, through the straits of Singapore and the coast of Siam northwards to China, and through China by land over the deserts of the Grand Tartary to the river Dwina, being a circuit three times the diameter of the earth, and every jot as far as the whole circumference, the name of God is not heard of, except among a few of the Indians that are Mahometans; the Word of God is not known, or the Son of God spoken of.

Having some warmth in my search after religion, occasioned by this reflection, and so little of it appearing in all the parts which I had travelled, I resolved to travel over the rest of the world in books, for my wandering days are pretty well over; I say, I resolved to travel the rest in books; and sure, said I, there must appear abundance of serious religion in the rest of the world, or else I know nothing at all of where I shall find it.

But I find by my reading, just as I did in travelling, that all the customs of nations, as to religion, were much alike; that, one with another, they are more devout in their worship of something, whatever it be, than inquisitive after what it is they

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worship; and most of the altars of worship in the world might to this day be inscribed to the unknown God.

This may seem a strange thing; but that wonder may cease when further inquiry is made into the particular objects of worship which the several nations of the world bow down to, some of which are so horrid, so absurd, as one would think human nature could not sink so low as to do her homage in so irrational a manner.

And here, being to speak of religion as idolatrous, it occurs to me that it seemed strange that, except in Persia and some part of Tartary, I found none of the people look up for their gods, but down; by which it came into my mind that, even in idolatry itself, the world was something degenerated, and their reason was more hoodwinked than their ancestors 1 .

By looking up and looking down, I mean, they do not, as the Romans, look up among the stars for their idols, place their gods in the skies, and worship, as we might say, like men, but look down among the brutes, form idols to themselves out of the beasts, and figure things like monsters, to adore them for their ugliness and horrible deformity.

Of the two, the former, in my opinion, was much the more rational idolatry, as particularly the Persians worshipping the sun; and when I had a particular account of that of Bengal, it presently occurred to my thoughts that there was something awful, something glorious and godlike in the sun, that, in the

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ignorance of the true God, might rationally bespeak the homage of the creatures; and to whom it seemed reasonable, where reason was its own judge only, without the helps of Revelation, to pay an adoration as the parent of light, and the giver of life to all the vegetative world, and as in a visible manner enlivening and influencing the rational and sensitive life, and which might, for aught they knew, at first create, as it did since so plainly affect, all things round us.

This thought gave birth to the following excursion, with which I shall close this observation:

Hail! glorious lamp, the parent of the day, Whose beams not only heat and life convey; But may that heat and life, for aught we know, On many, many distant worlds bestow. Immense, amazing globe of heavenly fire.

To whom all flames ascend, in whom all lights expire. Rolling in flames, emits eternal ray,

Yet self-sufficient suffers no decay. [Thy central vigour never, never dies, But life the motion, motion life supplies, When lesser bodies rob us of thy beams,

And intercept thy flowing, heavenly streams; Fools by mistake eclipse thee from their sight, When ‘tis the eyes eclipsed, and not thy light Thy absence constitutes effectual night

When rolling earth deprives us of thy light; And planets all opaque and beggarly,

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Borrow thy beams, and strive to shine like thee; In their mock, lifeless light we starve and freeze, And wait the warmth of thy returning rays.

Thy distance leaves us all recline and sad, And hoary winter governs in thy stead:

Swift thy returning vigour, warm and mild, Salutes the earth, and gets the world with child. Great soul of nature, from whose vital spring

Due heat and life diffused through everything: Govern’st the moon and stars by different ray, She queen of night, thee monarch of the day, The moon, and stars, and earth, and plants obey. When darker nations see thee placed on high, And feel thy warmth their genial heat supply; How imperceptible thy influence

Slides through their veins, and touches every sense; By glimmering nature led, they bow their knee, Mistake their God, and sacrifice to thee,

Mourn thy declining steps, and hate the night, But when in hope of thy approaching light, Bless thy return, which brings the cheerful day, And to thy wond’rous light false adorations pay. Nor can we blame the justice of the thought,

In minds by erring reason only taught. Nature, it seems, instructs a deity,

And reason says there ‘s none so bright as thee. Nor is thy influence so much a jest,

There ‘s something shocks our nature in the rest: To make a God, and then the tool adore,

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And bow to that that worshipped us before. The nonsense takes off all the reverence, That can’t be worshipping that is not sense. But when the spring of Nature shows its face, The glory of its rays, the swiftness of its race, Stupendous height and majesty divine,

And with what awful splendour it can shine, Who that no other news from heaven could hear,

Would think but this was God, would think and fear, No other idol ever came so near.

Certain it is that the Persians, who thus paid their adoration to the sun, were at that time some of the wisest people in the world. Some tell us that the great image that Nebuchadnezzar set up for all his people to worship, was represented holding the sun in his right hand; and that it was to the representation of the sun that he commanded all nations and kindreds to bow and to worship. If so, then the Assyrians were worshippers also of the sun as well as the Persians, which is not at all improbable. We read also in the Scripture of those nations who worshipped all the host of heaven, a thing much more rational, and nearer of kin to worshipping the great God of heaven than worshipping the whole host of the earth, and worshipping the most abject and loathsome creatures, or but even the representations of those creatures, which was still worse than the other.

But what are all the absurdities of heathenism, which at last are resolved into the degeneracy of mankind, and their being fallen from the knowledge of the true God, which was

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once, as we have reason to believe, diffused to all mankind? I say, what are these? And how much ground for just reflection do they afford us, compared to the gross things in practice which we find every day among those nations who profess to have had the clear light of Gospel revelation?

How many self-contradicting principles do they hold? How contrary to their profession do they act? How does one side burn for what another side abhors? And how do Christians, taking that venerable name for a general appellation, doom one another to the devil for a few disagreeing clauses of the same religion, while all profess to worship the same Deity, and to expect the same salvation?

With what preposterous enthusiasms do some mingle their knowledge, and with as gross absurdities others their devotion? How blindly superstitious; how furious and raging in their zeal? How cruel, inexorable, and even inhuman and barbarous to one another, when they differ? as if religion divested us of humanity, and that in our worshipping a God of mercy, and in whose compassions alone it is that we have room to hope, we should, to please and serve Him, banish humanity from our nature, and show no compassion to those that fall into our hands.

In my travelling through Portugal, it was my lot to come to Lisbon while they held there one of their courts of justice called Auto-de-fe that is to say, a court of justice of the Inquisition. It is a subject which has been handled by many writers, and indeed exposed by some of the best Catholics; and my

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