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

SERIOUS REFLECTIONS DURING THE LIFE...

the betrayers of his soul to misery, which would not consist with justice, much less with the goodness of a creator.

(2.) To persuade from hence, that the notions of future punishments are fables and amusements, that it is not rational to think a just God would prepare infinite and eternal punishments for finite and trivial offences; that God does not take notice of the minute acts of life, and lay every slip to our charge, but that the merciful dispositions of God, who so bountifully directs the whole world to be assistant to the profit and delight of mankind, has certainly given him leave to enjoy it at will, and take the comfort of it without fear.

(3.) Of late, indeed, the devil has learned — for devils may improve as well as men in the arts of doing ill — at last, I say, he has learned to infuse a wild notion into the beads of some people, who are first fitted for it by, having reasoned themselves in favour of their loose desires up to a pitch, that there is no such thing as a God or a future state at all.

Now, as at first the devil was not fool enough to attempt to put this jest upon man, his own antiquity and eternity being a contradiction to it; so I found among my new discoveries that the devil took this absurdity from man himself, and that it went among Satan’s people for a new invention. I found also that there was a black party employed upon this new subtlety; these were a sort of devils, for Satan never wants instruments, who were called insinuators, and who were formerly employed to prompt men to crimes by dreams; and here I shall

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observe, that I learned a way how to make any man dream of what I please. For example: suppose one to be sound asleep, or, as we say, in a deep sleep or dead sleep, let another lay his mouth close to his ear and whisper anything to him so softly as not to awaken him, the sleeping man shall certainly dream of what was whispered to him.

Let no man despise this hint: nothing is more sure than that many of our dreams are the whispers of the devil, who, by his insinuators, whispers into our heads what wicked things he would have our thoughts entertain and work upon; and take this with you as you go, those insinuating devils can do this as well when we are awake as when we are asleep. And this will bring me to what I call impulses upon the mind, which are certainly whispers in the ear and no other, and come either from good angels attending us, or from the devil’s insinuators, which are always at hand, and may be judged of according as the subject our thoughts are prompted to work upon is good or evil.

From whence but from these insinuators come our causeless passions, our involuntary wickedness, sinning in desire as effectually as by actual committing the crime we desire to commit?

Whence comes imagination to work upon wicked and vicious objects when the person is fast asleep, and when he had not been under the preparation of wicked discourse or wicked thoughts previous to those imaginations? Who forms ideas in the mind of man? who presents beautiful or terrible figures to his fancy, when his eyes are closed with sleep? who but these

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insinuating devils, who invisibly approach the man, sleeping or waking, and whisper all manner of lewd, abominable things into his mind.

Mr Milton, whose imagination was carried up to a greater height than I am now, went farther into the abyss of Satan’s empire a great way, especially when he formed Satan’s palace of pandemonium; I say, he was exactly of this opinion when he represented the devil tempting our mother Eve in the shape of a toad lying just at her ear, when she lay fast asleep in her bower, where he whispered to her ear all the wicked thing. which she entertained notions of by night, and which prompted her the next day to break the great command, which was the rule of her life; and, accordingly, he brings in Eve, telling Adam what an uneasy night’s rest she had, and relating her dream to him.

This thought, however laid down in a kind of jest, is very seriously intended, and would, if well digested, direct us very clearly in our judgment of dreams, viz., not to suggest them to be always things of mere chance; but that sometimes they are to be heeded as useful warnings of evil or good by the agency of good spirits, as at other times they are the artful insinuations of the devil to inject wicked thoughts and abhorred abominable ideas into the mind; which we ought not only as much as possible to guard against, but even to repent of so far as the mind may have entertained and acted upon them.

From this general vision of the devil’s management of his affairs, which I must own I have had with my eyes wide open, I find a great many useful observations to be made; and first, it can

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be no longer strange that, while the commerce of evil spirits is so free and the intercourse between this world and that is thus open, I say, it can be no longer strange that there are so many silent ways of spirits conversing; I mean, spirits of all kinds.

For, as I have observed already, there is a residence of good spirits, but they are placed infinitely higher, out of the reach and out of the sight of this lower orbit of Satan’s kingdom; as those pass and repass invisible, I confess I have yet had no ideas of them but those which I have received from my first view of the infernal region. If I should have any superior elevations, and should be able to see the economy or Heaven in His disposition of things on earth, I shall be as careful to convey them to posterity as they come in.

However, the transactions of good spirits with man are certainly the same; for as God has, for a protection and safeguard to mankind, limited the devil from affrighting him by visible appearances in his native and hellish deformity, and the horrid shape he would necessarily bear; so, for man’s felicity, even the glorious angels of heaven are very seldom allowed, at least not lately, to appear in the glorious forms they formerly took, or I indeed, in any form, or with a voice; the restraint of our souls in the case of flesh and blood we now wear not admitting it, and not being able to familiarise those things to us; man being by no means, in his incorporated state, qualified for an open and easy conversation with unembodied spirit.

Moreover, this would be breaking into the limits which the wisdom and goodness of God has put to our present stale,

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I mean as to futurity, our ignorance in which is the greatest felicity of human life; and without which necessary blindness man could not support life, for nature is no way able to support a view into futurity; I mean, not into that part of futurity which concerns us in our state of life in this world.

I have often been myself among the number of those fools that would be their own fortune-tellers; but when I look thus beyond the atmosphere, and see a little speculatively into invisibles, I could easily perceive that it is our happiness that we are short-sighted creatures, and can see but a very little before us. For example, were we to have the eyes of our souls opened through the eyes of our bodies, we should see this very immediate region of air which we breathe in thronged with spirits, to us, blessed be God, now invisible, and which would otherwise see into the secret transactions of those messengers who are employed when the passing soul takes its leave of the reluctant body, and perhaps see things nature would shrink back from with the utmost terror and amazement. In a word, the curtain of Providence for the disposition of things here, and the curtain of judgment for the determination of the state of soul hereafter I would be alike drawn back; and what heart could support here its future state in life, much less that of its future state after life, even good or bad?

It is, then, our felicity that the converse of spirits and the visions of futurity are silent, emblematic, and done by hints, dreams, and impulses, and not by clear vision and open discovery. They that desire fuller and plainer sight of these things ask

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they know not what; and it was a good answer of a gipsy, when, a lady of my acquaintance asked her to tell her fortune, “Do not ask me, lady,” said the gipsy, “to tell you what you dare not hear.” The woman was a little honester than her profession intimated, and freely confessed it was all a cheat, and that they knew nothing of fortunes, but had a course or round of doubtful expressions, to amuse ignorant people and get a little money.

Even the devil’s oracles — for such, no doubt, they were at Delphos and at other places, though the devil seemed at that time to have some liberties granted him which it is evident have since been denied him — were allowed to be given only in doubtful expressions, double entendres, echoes of words, and such like. For example: a man going to sea, and inquiring of the oracle thus —

“Have I just cause the seas and storms to fear?” Echo— “Fear.”

Another.

“Shall we the Parthian boatmen fight, or fly?” Echo— “Fly.”

Such dark replies, and other words doubtful and enigmatic, were frequently given and taken for answers, by which the deluded world were kept in doubt of that futurity they hunted after. But Satan, even then, was not permitted to speak plain, or mankind to see what awaited them behind the dark veil of

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futurity; nor was it proper, on any account whatsoever, that it should be otherwise.

But before I come to this let me put some limits to the elevation. and visions I have mentioned before; for as I am far from enthusiastic in my notions of things, so I would not lead anyone to fancy themselves farther enlightened than is meet, or to see things invisible, as St Paul heard things unutterable.

And, therefore, let me add here, that the highest rapture’s, trances, and elevations of the soul are bounded by the eternal decree of Heaven, and let men pretend to what visions they please, it is all romance; all beyond what I have talked of above is fabulous and absurd, and it will for ever be true, as the Scripture’ says, not only those things are hid from the eye, but even from the conception.

Upon this occasion, I must own that I think it is criminal to attempt to form ideas either of hell or of heaven in the mind, other than as the Scripture has described them, by the state rather than the place. We are told, in plain words, it hath not entered into the heart of man to conceive either of what is prepared for the future state of the happy or miserable; ‘tis enough for us to entertain the general notion — the favour of God is heaven, and the loss of it the most dreadful of all, hell.

A heaven of joy must in His presence dwell, And in His absence every place is hell

My meaning is this; all visions, or propounded visions, either of heaven or hell, are mere delusions of the mind, and

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generally are fictions of a waking bewildered head; and you may see the folly of them in the meanest of the descriptions, which generally end in showing some glorious place, fine walks, noble illustrious palaces, gardens of gold, and people of shining forms and the like. Alas! these are all so short that they are unworthy the thoughts of a mind elevated two degrees above darkness and dirt. All these things amount to no more than Mahomet’s Alcoran and the glorious state of things represented by him to his believers. In short, all this makes only a heaven of sense, but comes so infinitely short of what alone must or can be a heaven to an exalted glorified spirit, that I as much want words to express how contemptible the best of these descriptions are as to a true description of heaven as I do to express a true idea or description of heaven myself.

And how should this be done? We can form no idea of anything that we know not and have not seen but in the form of something that we have seen. How, then, can we form an idea of God or heaven in any form but of something which we have seen or known? By what image in the mind can we judge of spirits! By what idea conceive of eternal glory? Let us cease to imagine concerning it; ‘tis impossible to attain, it is criminal to attempt it.

Let me, therefore, hint here, that supposing myself, as before, in the orbit of the sun, take it in its immense distance as our astronomers conceive of it, or on the edge only of the

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atmosphere with a clear view of the whole solar system, the region of Satan’s empire all in view, and the world of spirits laid open to me :

Yet let me give you this for a check to your imagination, that even here the space between finite and infinite is as impenetrable as on earth, and will for ever be so till our spirits, being uncased, shall take their flight in the centre of glory, where everything shall be seen as it is; and therefore you must not be surprised if I am come down again from the verge of the world of spirits the same short-sighted wretch as to futurity and things belonging to heaven and hell as I went up; for elevations of this kind are meant only to give us a clearer view of what we are, not of what we shall be, and ‘tis an advantage worth travelling for too. All this I thought necessary to prevent the whimsical building of erroneous structures on my foundation, and fancying themselves carried farther than they are able to go.

I come, therefore, back to talk of things familiar, and particularly to mention in the next place some of those other ways by which we have notice given of this converse of spirits which I have been speaking of; for the whispers and insinuators I have mentioned go sometimes farther than ordinary.

One of those other methods is, when, by strong impulses of the mind, as we call them, we are directed to do or not to do this or that particular thing that we have before us to do, or

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are under a consultation about. I am a witness to many of these things, as well in my own life as in my observation of others.

I know a man, who being at some distance from London, not above six or seven miles, a friend that came to visit and dine with him urged him to go to London. “What for?” says his friend; “is there any business wants me?”

“Nay, nothing,” says the other, “but for your company; I do not know of anything wants you;” and so gave over importuning him. But as his friend had given it over a strong impulse of mind seized him and followed him, like a voice, with this — Go to London, go to London. He put it by several times, but it went on still — Go to London, go to London, and nothing else could come upon his thoughts but Go to London. He came back to his friend, “Hark ye,” says he, “tell me sincerely, is all well at London? Am I wanted there? Did you ask me to go to London with you on any particular account?” — “Not I,” says his friend, “in the least; I saw all your family, and all is very well there; nor did they say they had any particular occasion for you to return; I only ask it, as I told you, for the sake of your company.” So he put off going again, but could have no quiet, for it still followed him, and no doubt a good spirit communicated it — Go to London; and at length he resolved he would go, and did so; and when he came there he found a letter, and messengers had been at his house to seek him and to tell him of a particular business, which was, first and last, worth above, thousand pounds to him, and which, if he had not been found that very night, would have been in danger of being lost.

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