It is true that towards the end of his fourth volume, after having
walked through a hundred labyrinths, and having fought with everybody he
met on the road, he comes at last to his great question which he had
left there. He lays all the blame on the Book of Job which passes among
scholars for an Arab work, and he tries to prove that Job did not
believe in the immortality of the soul. Later he explains in his own way
all the texts of Holy Writ by which people have tried to combat this
opinion.
All one can say about it is that, if he was right, it was not for a
bishop to be right in such a way. He should have felt that one might
draw dangerous inferences; but everything in this world is a mass of
contradiction. This man, who became accuser and persecutor, was not made
bishop by a minister of state's patronage until immediately after he had
written his book.
At Salamanca, Coimbre or Rome, he would have been obliged to recant and
to ask pardon. In England he became a peer of the realm with an income
of a hundred thousand _livres_; it was enough to modify his methods.
SECTION VI
OF THE NEED OF REVELATION
The greatest benefit we owe to the New Testament is that it has revealed
to us the immortality of the soul. It is in vain, therefore, that this
fellow Warburton tried to cloud over this important truth, by
continually representing in his legation of Moses that "the ancient Jews
knew nothing of this necessary dogma, and that the Sadducees did not
admit it in the time of our Lord Jesus."
He interprets in his own way the very words that have been put into
Jesus Christ's mouth: "... have ye not read that which was spoken unto
you by God, saying, I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and
the God of Jacob? God is not the God of the dead, but of the living"
(St. Matt. xxii. 31, 32). He gives to the parable of the wicked rich man
a sense contrary to that of all the Churches. Sherlock, Bishop of
London, and twenty other scholars refuted him. English philosophers even
reproached him with the scandal of an Anglican bishop manifesting an
opinion so contrary to the Anglican Church; and after that, this man
takes it into his head to treat these persons as impious: like the
character of _Arlequin_ in the comedy of the _Devaliseur de maisons_,
who, after throwing the furniture out of the window, sees a man carrying
some of it off, and cries with all his might "Stop thief!"
One should bless the revelation of the immortality of the soul, and of
rewards and punishments after death, all the more that mankind's vain
philosophy has always been sceptical of it. The great Caesar did not
believe in it at all, he made himself quite clear in full senate when,
in order to stop Catalina being put to death, he represented that death
left man without sensation, that everything died with him; and nobody
refuted this view.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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