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Human life is a mistake, and all our hopes and aspirations a hollow mockery. Pliny set forth this view long ago in these words: "The vanity of man, and his insatiable longing after existence, have led him to dream of a life after death. A being full of contradictions, he is the most wretched of creatures, since the other creatures have no wants transcending the bounds of their nature. Man is full of desires and wants, that reach to infinity, and can never be satisfied. His nature is a lie—uniting the greatest poverty with the greatest pride. Among those so great evils, the best thing God has bestowed on man is the power to take his own life." While such views as these prevailed—and they were very common in ancient Rome-one does not wonder at the deep, dark, hopeless despair, that settled like a black cloud upon the people, and the extreme prevalence of suicide as the only means by which escape from the ills of life could be accomplished. In our own day we have this same monstrous doctrine again proclaimed. Says Schopenhauer-the great modern apostle of Pessimisim, "Evil is real, colossal, incessant; the world is bad, it is a misery to have been born.' "Life is the natural history of sorrow, it is the war of all against all, an internecine strife for ever removed from age to age, till the crust of the planet shall peel off piecemeal." Such notions must necessarily engender despair, for they shut out every spark of hope, and cover the soul with clouds of hell's own blackness. More than one modern poet has espoused this dismal philosophy, and become the advocate of a system over which Dante's line may be appropriately written :

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"Abandon hope all you who enter here."

The hero of Tennyson's poem, seems to think God

hateful, because He does not remove the ills of human life, and hence the wild raving idiotic blasphemy which he hurls against heaven—

"And the suns of the limitless Universe sparkled and shone in the sky,

Flashing with fires as of God, but we knew that their light was a lie

Bright as with deathless hope-but however they sparkled and shone,

The dark little worlds running round them, were worlds of woe like

our own

Nc soul in the heaven above, no soul on the earth below,

A fiery scroll written over with lamentation and woe."

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Why should we bear with an hour of torture, a moment of pain If any man die for ever if all his griefs are in vain,

And the homeless planet at length will be wheel'd thro' the silence

of space

Motherless evermore of an ever-vanishing race.

When the worm shall have writhed its last, and its last brother worm will have fled

From the dead fossil skull that is left in the rocks of an earth that is dead ?"

This Pessimistic raving is indicative of a despair which has taken a fixed and settled position in the soul. Hope has fled, and all the brightness, even to the last spark, has departed from life. Pity for such an one we must feel, and yet he writes his own condemnation. (b) But there is another kind of false conception of God, no less fatal to the soul's health than this one; although, as I have said, usually associated with very different persons and very opposite views, it is that which supposes that from all eternity God fore-ordained or fore-doomed millions of men to endless suffering for doing that which they were powerless to avoid, or for

not doing that for which they had neither inclination nor ability. And this latter frequently gives birth to the former-did so, in fact, in the hero of Tennyson's poem. The Calvinism of a past age is fast passing away, but it lingers yet in dark and benighted spots of our land. Hypers, as such persons are called, are by no means extinct. They may not to-day believe that infants a span long are writhing in the fires of hell, as was held by their predecessors, but the broad principle of their creed remains unchanged. They are the elect chosen by God from all eternity to occupy the chief places in the celestial mansions, whilst thousands of their fellow men are doomed by an irresistible and irreversible decree to suffer the pangs of inconceivable torment for ever and ever. They have no fear on their own account, and so far are not likely to despair. But should their sympathies widen, their charity increase, and their love for their fellow men grow stronger, a fearful collision must ensue between their affections and their creed, and unless the latter goes to pieces, as, thank God, it does in many cases, they must suffer a perfect spiritual nightmare when they think of the fate of their fellow men-their own fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, and children, included who may be amongst the reprobate-and gloom leading to despair, will follow as certainly as the night, the day. Besides, there is the fearful condition of mind on the part, those who are not quite certain about their state to be taken into consideration. These looking on the one hand to the decrees of God, and on the other to their own fears and misgivings, will in great numbers of cases come to lose all hope and sink into a condition of utter despair. In the end

they probably become sceptical, and then proceed to blaspheme as does the person pourtrayed in this poem. It must be remembered that he had been a religious man of a certain type, as he tells us :

"See we were nursed in the dark night-fold of your fatalist creed, And we turned to the growing dawn, we had hoped for a dawn indeed,

When the light of a Sun that was coming would scatter the ghosts of the Past,

And the cramping creeds that had maddened the peoples would vanish at last,

And we broke away from the Christ, our human brother and friend, For He spoke, or it seem'd that He spoke, of a Hell without help, without end.

Hoped for a dawn and it came, but the promise had faded away;
We had past from a cheerless night to the glare of a drearier day;
He is only a cloud and a smoke who was once a pillar of fire,
The guess of a worm in the dust and the shadow of its desire-
Of a worm as it writhes in a world of the weak, trodden down by
the strong,

Of a dying worm in a world, all massacre, murder, and wrong."

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"Nay, but I am not claiming your pity: I know you of oldSmall pity for those that have ranged from the narrow warmth of your fold;

Where you bawled the dark side of your faith, and a God of eternal rage,

Till you flung us back on ourselves, and the human heart and the Age."

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“What! I should call on that Infinite Love that has served us so well?

Infinite wickedness rather, that made everlasting Hell,

Made us, foreknew us, foredoom'd us, and does what He will with

His own;

Better our dead brute mother who never has heard us groan!
Hell? If the souls of men were immortal, as men have been told,
The lecher would cleave to his lusts, and the miser would yearn for
his gold,

And so there were Hell for ever! but were there a God as you say,
His Love would have power over Hell, till it utterly vanished away.
Ah yet I have had some glimmer at times in my gloomiest woe,
Of a God behind all-after all-the great God for aught that I
know;

But the God of Love and of Hell together-they cannot be thought,. If there be such a God, may the Great God curse him and bring him to naught."

One can easily trace in the mind of this maddened victim of despair, the causes of his present condition. A false theology struck its poison fangs deep into his heart, and the reaction came, unbelief took the place of faith, trust was exchanged for hate, and hope was smothered in the turbulent raging waters of rebellion against God. There is a dramatic fragment of Proctor in which he narrates the reckless career of a prince, who for similar blasphemy against God, shared a fate according to a Spanish superstition, something like that of Lot's wife.

"He flung some terrible reproach at heaven,

Laughed at its God, 'tis said, and cursed the sun;
Whereat the broad eye of the day unclosed,

And stared him into stone."

2. Misanthropic Notions Respecting the Human Race. The loss of faith in our fellow men is a prolific cause of despair. We place confidence in men, and we are betrayed, we trust them and they deceive us, we open up our inmost souls for their inspection, and they prove treacherous. Not one, but many, turn out false to all their promises and pretentions. Our bosom friends, those upon whose honour and honesty we could have nearly staked our lives, not only forsake us, but become our bitterest foes, and use against us weapons formed from what their professed friendship

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