----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.