OF WARBURTON'S PARADOX ON THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL
Warburton, editor and commentator of Shakespeare and Bishop of
Gloucester, making use of English freedom, and abuse of the custom of
hurling insults at one's adversaries, has composed four volumes to prove
that the immortality of the soul was never announced in the Pentateuch,
and to conclude from this same proof that Moses' mission is divine. Here
is the précis of his book, which he himself gives, pages 7 and 8 of the
first volume.
"1. The doctrine of a life to come, of rewards and punishments after
death, is necessary to all civil society.
"2. The whole human race (_and this is where he is mistaken_), and
especially the wisest and most learned nations of antiquity, concurred
in believing and teaching this doctrine.
"3. It cannot be found in any passage of the law of Moses; therefore the
law of Moses is of divine origin. Which I am going to prove by the two
following syllogisms:
_First Syllogism_
"Every religion, every society that has not the immortality of the soul
for its basis, can be maintained only by an extraordinary providence;
the Jewish religion had not the immortality of the soul for basis;
therefore the Jewish religion was maintained by an extraordinary
providence.
_Second Syllogism_
"All the ancient legislators have said that a religion which did not
teach the immortality of the soul could not be maintained but by an
extraordinary providence; Moses founded a religion which is not founded
on the immortality of the soul; therefore Moses believed his religion
maintained by an extraordinary providence."
What is much more extraordinary is this assertion of Warburton's, which
he has put in big letters at the beginning of his book. He has often
been reproached with the extreme rashness and bad faith with which he
dares to say that all the ancient legislators believed that a religion
which is not founded on pains and recompenses after death, can be
maintained only by an extraordinary providence; not one of them ever
said it. He does not undertake even to give any example in his huge book
stuffed with a vast number of quotations, all of which are foreign to
his subject. He has buried himself beneath a pile of Greek and Latin
authors, ancient and modern, for fear one might see through him on the
other side of a horrible multitude of envelopes. When criticism finally
probed to the bottom, he was resurrected from among all these dead men
in order to load all his adversaries with insults.
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.