Sometimes they speak of Death and the Hereafter, of which the child they buried yesterday knows more than the wisest of them, and more than Shakespeare knew. The being totally ignorant of the subject does not indeed (as you may perhaps have observed in other matters) deter some of them from speaking of it with great confidence; but the views of a minority would quite surprise you, and this minority is growing—coming to a majority. Every day I see an increase of the doubters. It is not a question of the Orthodox and the Infidel, you must understand, at all, though that is assuming great proportions; but there is every day more uncertainty among them, and, what is much more noteworthy, more dissatisfaction.
Years ago, when a hardy Cambridge scholar dared to publish his doubts of an eternal punishment overtaking the wicked, an orthodox professor of the same college took him (theologically) by the throat. 'You are destroying,' he cried, 'the hope of the Christian.' But this is not the hope I speak of, as loosing, and losing, its hold upon men's minds; I mean the real hope, the hope of heaven.
When I used to go to church—for my inn is too far removed from it to admit of my attendance there nowadays—matters were very different. Heaven and Hell were, in the eyes not only of our congregation, but of those who hung about the doors in the summer sun, or even played leap-frog over the grave-stones, as distinct alternatives as the east and west highways on each side of my inn. If you did not go one way, you must go the other; and not only so, but an immense desire was felt by very many to go in the right direction. Now I perceive it is not so. A considerable number of highway passengers, though even they are less numerous than of old, are still studious—that is in their aspirations—to avoid taking (shall I say delicately) the lower road; but only a few, comparatively, are solicitous to reach the goal of the upper.
Let me once more observe that I am speaking of the ordinary passengers—those who travel by the mail. Of the persons who are convinced that there never was an Architect of the Universe, and that Man sprang from the Mollusc, I know little or nothing: they mostly travel two and two, in gigs, and have quarrelled so dreadfully on the way, that, at the Inn, they don't speak to one another. The commonalty, I repeat, are losing their hopes of heaven, just as the grown-up schoolboy finds his paradise no more in home. I can remember when divines were never tired of painting the lily, of indulging in the most glowing descriptions of the Elysian Fields. A popular artist once drew a picture of them: 'The Plains of Heaven' it was called, and the painter's name was Martin. If he was to do so now, the public (who are vulgar) would exclaim 'Betty Martin.' Not that they disbelieve in it, but that the attractions of the place are dying out, like those of Bath and Cheltenham.
Of course some blame attaches to the divines themselves that things have come to such a pass. 'I protest,' says a great philosopher, 'that I never enter a church, but the man in the pulpit talks so unlike a man, as though he had never known what human joys or sorrows are—so carefully avoids every subject of interest save one, and paints that in colours at once so misty and so meretricious—that I say to myself, I will never sit under him again.' This may, of course, be only an ingenious excuse of his for not going to church; but there is really something in it. The angels, with their harps, on clouds, are now presented to the eyes, even of faith, in vain; they are still appreciated on canvas by an old master, but to become one of them is no longer the common aspiration. There is a suspicion, partly owing, doubtless, to the modern talk about the dignity and even the divinity of Labour, that they ought to be doing something else than (as the American poet puts it with characteristic ii reverence) 'loafing about the throne;' that we ourselves, with no ear perhaps for music, and with little voice (alas!) for praise, should take no pleasure in such avocations. It is not the sceptics—though their influence is getting to be considerable—who have wrought this change, but the conditions of modern life. Notwithstanding the cheerful 'returns' as to pauperism, and the glowing speeches of our Chancellors of the Exchequer, these conditions are far harder, among the thinking classes, than they were. The question 'Is Life worth Living?' is one that concerns philosophers and metaphysicians, and not the persons I have in my mind at all; but the question, 'Do I wish to be out of it?' is one that is getting answered very widely—and in the affirmative. This was certainly not the case in the days of our grand-sires. Which of them ever read those lines—
'For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing lingering look behind?'—
without a sympathetic complacency? This may not have been the best of all possible worlds to them, but none of them wished to exchange it, save at the proper time, and for the proper place. Thanks to overwork, and still more to over-worry, it is not so now. There are many prosperous persons in rude health, of course, who will ask (with a virtuous resolution that is sometimes to be deplored), 'Do you suppose then that I wish to cut my throat?' I certainly do not. Do not let us talk of cutting throats; though, mind you, the average of suicides, so admirably preserved by the Registrar-General and other painstaking persons, is not entirely to be depended upon. You should hear the doctors at my Inn (in the intervals of their abuse of their professional brethren) discourse upon this topic—on that overdose of chloral which poor B. took, and on that injudicious self-application of chloroform which carried off poor C. With the law in such a barbarous state in relation to self-destruction, and taking into account the feelings of relatives, there was, of course, only one way of wording the certificate, but—and then they shake their heads as only doctors can, and help themselves to port, though they know it is poison to them.
It is an old joke that annuitants live for ever, but no annuity ever had the effect of prolonging life which the present assurance companies have. How many a time, I wonder, in these later years, has a hand been stayed, with a pistol or 'a cup of cold poison' in it, by the thought, 'If I do this, my family will lose the money I am insured for, besides the premiums.' This feeling is altogether different from that which causes Jeannette and Jeannot in their Paris attic to light their charcoal fire, stop up the chinks with their love-letters, and die (very disreputably) 'clasped in one another's arms, and silent in a last embrace.' There is not one halfpenny's worth of sentiment about it in the Englishman's case, nor are any such thoughts bred in his brain while youth is in him. It is in our midway days, with old age touching us here and there, as autumn 'lays its fiery finger on the leaves' and withers them, that we first think of it. When the weight of anxiety and care is growing on us, while the shoulders are becoming bowed (not in resignation, but in weakness) which have to bear it; when our pains are more and more constant, our pleasures few and fading, and when whatever happens, we know, must needs be for the worse—then it is that the praise of the silver hair and length of days becomes a mockery indeed.
Was it the prescience of such a state of thought, I wonder (for it certainly did not exist in their time), that caused good men of old to extol old age; as though anything could reconcile the mind of man to the time when the very sun is darkened to him, and 'the clouds return after the rain?' There is a noble passage in 'Hyperion' which has always seemed to me to repeat that sentiment in Ecclesiastes; it speaks of an expression in a man's face:
'As though the vanward clouds of evil days
Had spent their malice, and the sullen rear
Was with its storied thunder labouring up.'
This is why poor Paterfamilias, sitting in the family pew, is not so enamoured of that idea of accomplishing those threescore years and ten which the young parson, fresh from Cambridge, is describing as such a lucky number in life's lottery. The attempt to paint it so is well-meaning, no doubt, 'the vacant chaff well meant for grain;' and it is touching to see how men generally (knowing that they themselves have to go through with it) are wont to portray it in cheerful colours.
A modern philosopher even goes so far as to say that our memories in old age are always grateful to us. Our pleasures are remembered, but our pains are forgotten; 'if we try to recall a physical pain,' she writes (for it is a female), 'we find it to be impossible,' From which I gather only this for certain, that that woman never had the gout.
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