This first blossom of reason is threatened with the loss
of both its stalk and its soil: for, if the revolutionary tyrant should
triumph, he would destroy all the English books and energies of thought. I
conjure my readers to translate this work into Latin, and to bury it in
the ground, communicating on their death-beds only its place of
concealment to men of nature.'
From the title page of this work, by the way, I learn that 'the 7000th
year of Astronomical History' is taken from the Chinese tables, and
coincides (as I had supposed) with the year 1812 of our computation.
ON SUICIDE.
It is a remarkable proof of the inaccuracy with which most men read--that
Donne's _Biathanatos_ has been supposed to countenance Suicide; and
those who reverence his name have thought themselves obliged to apologize
for it by urging, that it was written before he entered the church. But
Donne's purpose in this treatise was a pious one: many authors had charged
the martyrs of the Christian church with Suicide--on the principle that if
I put myself in the way of a mad bull, knowing that he will kill me--I am
as much chargeable with an act of self-destruction as if I fling myself
into a river. Several casuists had extended this principle even to the
case of Jesus Christ: one instance of which, in a modern author, the
reader may see noticed and condemned by Kant, in his _Religion innerhalb
die gronzen der blossen Vernunft_; and another of much earlier date (as
far back as the 13th century, I think), in a commoner book--Voltaire's
notes on the little treatise of Beccaria, _Dei delitti e delle pene_.
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