——But she did not know I was under a vow not to shave my beard till I
got to _Paris;_——yet I hate to make mysteries of nothing;——’tis the
cold cautiousness of one of those little souls from which _Lessius
(lib. 13. de moribus divinis, cap. 24.)_ hath made his estimate,
wherein he setteth forth, That one _Dutch_ mile, cubically multiplied,
will allow room enough, and to spare, for eight hundred thousand
millions, which he supposes to be as great a number of souls (counting
from the fall of _Adam_) as can possibly be damn’d to the end of the
world.
From what he has made this second estimate——unless from the parental
goodness of God—I don’t know—I am much more at a loss what could be in
_Franciscus Ribbera_’s head, who pretends that no less a space than one
of two hundred _Italian_ miles multiplied into itself, will be
sufficient to hold the like number——he certainly must have gone upon
some of the old _Roman_ souls, of which he had read, without reflecting
how much, by a gradual and most tabid decline, in the course of
eighteen hundred years, they must unavoidably have shrunk so as to have
come, when he wrote, almost to nothing.
In _Lessius_’s time, who seems the cooler man, they were as little as
can be imagined——
——We find them less _now_——
And next winter we shall find them less again; so that if we go on from
little to less, and from less to nothing, I hesitate not one moment to
affirm, that in half a century at this rate, we shall have no souls at
all; which being the period beyond which I doubt likewise of the
existence of the Christian faith, ’twill be one advantage that both of
’em will be exactly worn out together.
Blessed _Jupiter!_ and blessed every other heathen god and goddess! for
now ye will all come into play again, and with _Priapus_ at your
tails——what jovial times!——but where am I? and into what a delicious
riot of things am I rushing? I——I who must be cut short in the midst of
my days, and taste no more of ’em than what I borrow from my
imagination——peace to thee, generous fool! and let me go on.