Contagion and Quarantine.

Date:
[1822]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Contagion and Quarantine. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    623 Lord Byron's Dramas. found i>i the volume of the Old Testament, we might be reduced to suppose, extraordinary as such a supposition would be, that the na- tion of Israel stood alone among all their neighbours, andamong all nations of the world who have attained even a moderate degree of civilization, in their blindness to a truth which is tolerably conspi- cuous even to unassisted reason. But if Lord Byron will take the trouble to consult the ‘ Argumenta Immortalitatis Animarum ex Mose Collecta’ of the same illustrious scholar whose words we have just cited ; or if he will, calmly and without prejudice, compare the expressions used by Moses in speaking of the departure of Enoch to God; of the deceased patriarchs as still existing; and of ‘ the death of the righteous’ as prayed for by Balaam ; with the still stronger expressions in the book of Job, in the Psalms, in Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel, he may be satisfied that, to the persons who used such language, the idea of a life after death was familiar, and that such expressions presuppose the nation to whom they are ad- dressed to be equally acquainted wjth it and convinced of it. It is not true, then, that the immortality of the soul was un- known to Moses or the Israelites. It is highly improbable that it was unknown to the first ilia'll or his children. And it is certain that the prospect of such a life after death is, to the virtuous man, a sufficient ground for trusting the goodness and justice of the Almighty, a sufficient comfort under all the evils incidental to his present condition. Or if, to men, such as men are, and oppressed, as they well may be, with the sense of their own imperfections, and an apprehension of the further anger of the Deity, an additional ground of hope is necessary, we may be forgiven if we point out, (though we have thus far avoided, as much as possible, all topics purely theological,) that mysterious atonement which was antici- pated by the earliest as it is looked back to by the latest generation of mankind; which was shadowed in the bloody sacrifice of the Patriarch as surely as in the Eucharist of the Christian, and the beneficial effects of which we believe to have extended and still to extend to those who have not heard, as well as those who have received the Gospel. The origin of evil itself is among those secrets of Providence which, if they do not surpass our present faculties, are, at least, not as yet communicated to us. It is one of the many vulgar errors by which the subject has been encumbered, to suppose that such a communication is found in the Book of Genesis. All which Moses relates is the first appearance of that evil which must have previously existed, the first demonstration of those hateful passions and that aspiring pride w hich have made labour and death no more than necessary to the w ell-being of nature. Of the causes which may have induced the Almighty to create man peccable, to expose
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