Other related topics at: Religion and Morality 3. Bolingbroke; Morality; Religion "Sir, he [Bolingbroke] was a scoundrel, and a coward: a scoundrel for charging a blunderbuss against religion and morality; a coward, because he had not resolution to fire it off himself, but left half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman, to draw the trigger after his death!" Boswell: Life Link 25. Religion "For my part, Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious." Boswell: Life Link 35. Religion Talking of those who denied the truth of Christianity, he said, "It is always easy to be on the negative side. If a man were now to deny that there is salt on the table, you could not reduce him to an absurdity. Come, let us try this a little further. I deny that Canada is taken, and I can support my denial by pretty good arguments. The French are a much more numerous people than we; and it is not likely that they would allow us to take it. 'But the ministry have assured us, in all the formality of the Gazette, that it is taken.' -- Very true. But the ministry have put us to an enormous expence by the war in America, and it is their interest to persuade us that we have got something for our money -- 'But the fact is confirmed by thousands of men who were at the taking of it.' -- Ay, but these men have still more interest in deceiving us. They don't want that you should think the French have beat them, but that they have beat the French. Now suppose you should go over and find that it really is taken, that would only satisfy yourself; for when you come home we will not believe you. We will say, you have been bribed. -- Yet, Sir, notwithstanding all those plausible objections, we have no doubt that Canada is really ours. Such is the weight of common testimony. How much stronger are the evidences of the Christian religion?" Boswell: Life Link 44. Miracles; Religion "Why, Sir, the great difficulty of proving miracles should make us very cautious in believing them. But let us consider; although God has made Nature to operate by certain fixed laws, yet it is not unreasonable to think that he may suspend those laws in order to establish a system highly advantageous to mankind. Now the Christian Religion is a most beneficial system, as it gives us light and certainty where we were before in darkness and doubt. The miracles which prove it are attested by men who had no interest in deceiving us; but who, on the contrary, were told that they should suffer persecution, and did actually lay down their lives in confirmation of the truth of the facts which they asserted. Indeed, for some centuries the heathens did not pretend to deny the miracles; but said they were performed by the aid of evil spirits. This is a circumstance of great weight. Then, Sir, when we take the proofs derived from prophecies which have been so exactly fulfilled, we have most satisfactory evidence. Supposing a miracle possible, as to which, in my opinion, there can be no doubt, we have as strong evidence for the miracles in support of Christianity, as the nature of the thing admits." Boswell: Life Link 66. Religion; Withdrawal From The World "If convents should be allowed at all, they should only be retreats for persons unable to serve the publick, or who have served it. It is our first duty to serve society; and after we have done that, we may attend wholly to the salvation of our own souls. A youthful passion for abstracted devotion should not be encouraged." Boswell: Life Link 91. Religion "There is a prodigious difference between the external form of one of your Presbyterian churches in Scotland, and a church in Italy; yet the doctrine taught is essentially the same." Boswell: Life Link 104. Martyrdom; Religion "Sir, if a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it. He must be convinced he has a delegation from heaven." Boswell: Life Link 123. Religion; Ritual; Sabbath I asked Johnson whether I might go to a consultation with another lawyer upon Sunday, as that appeared to me to be doing work as much in my own way, as if an artisan should work on the day appropriated for religious rest. Johnson: "Why, Sir, when you are of consequence enough to oppose the practice of consulting on Sunday, you should do it: but you may go now. It is not criminal, though it is not what one should do, who is anxious for the preservation and increase of piety, to which a peculiar observance of Sunday is a great help. The distinction is clear between what is of moral and what is of ritual obligation." Boswell: Life Link 140. Religion; Ritual "The Church does not superstitiously observe days, merely as days, but as memorials of important facts. Christmas might be kept as well upon one day of the year as another; but there should be a stated day for commemorating the birth of our Saviour, because there is danger that what may be done on any day, will be neglected." Boswell: Life Link 234. After-life; Death; Mortality; Religion I mentioned to Dr. Johnson, that David Hume's persisting in his infidelity, when he was dying, shocked me much. Johnson: "Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man, who had been at no pains to inquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way. It was not to be expected that the prospect of death would alter his way of thinking, unless God should send an angel to set him right." I said, I had no reason to believe that the thought of annihilation gave Hume no pain. Johnson: "It was not so, Sir. He had a vanity in being thought easy. It is more probable that he should assume an appearance of ease, than that so very probable a thing should be, as a man not afraid of going (as, in spite of his delusive theory, he cannot be sure but he may go,) into an unknown state, and not being uneasy at leaving all he knew. And you are to consider, that upon his own principle of annihilation he had no motive to speak the truth." Boswell: Life Link 284. Religion Boswell: "There are, I am afraid, many people who have no religion at all." Seward: "And sensible people, too." Johnson: "Why, Sir, not sensible in that respect. There must be either a natural or moral stupidity, if one lives in a total neglect of so very important a concern." Seward: "I wonder that there should be people without religion." Johnson: "Sir, you need not wonder at this, when you consider how large a proportion of almost every man's life is passed without thinking of it." Boswell: Life Link 285. Mortality; Religion Seward: "One should think that sickness, and the view of death, would make more men religious." Johnson: "Sir, they do not know how to go about it: they have not the first notion. A man who has never had religion before, no more grows religious when he is sick, than a man who has never learnt figures can count when he has need of calculation." Boswell: Life Link 297. Piety; Religion On the Roman Catholick religion he said, "If you join the Papists externally, they will not interrogate you strictly as to your belief in their tenets. No reasoning Papist believes every article of their faith. There is one side on which a good man might be persuaded to embrace it. A good man, of a timorous disposition, in great doubt of his acceptance with God, and pretty credulous, might be glad to be of a church where there are so many helps to get to Heaven. I would be a Papist if I could. I have fear enough; but an obstinate rationality prevents me. I shall never be a Papist, unless on the near approach of death, of which I have a great terrour. I wonder that women are not all Papists." Boswell: "They are not more afraid of death than men are." Johnson: "Because they are less wicked." Dr. Adams: "They are more pious." Johnson: "No, hang 'em, they are not more pious. A wicked fellow is the most pious when he takes to it. He'll beat you all at piety." Boswell: Life Link 331. Religion; Sabbath Dr. Johnson enforced the strict observance of Sunday. "It should be different," he observed, "from another day. People may walk, but not throw stones at birds. There may be relaxation, but there should be no levity." Boswell: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides Link 338. Religion He mentioned (I think) Tillotson's argument against transubstantiation; "That we are as sure we see bread and wine only, as that we read in the Bible the text on which that false doctrine is founded. We have only the evidence of our senses for both. If," he added, "God had never spoken figuratively, we might hold that he speaks literally, when he says, 'This is my body.'" Boswell: "But what do you say, Sir, to the ancient and continued tradition of the Church upon this point?" Johnson: "Tradition, Sir, has no place, where the Scriptures are plain; and tradition cannot persuade a man into a belief of transubstantation. Able men, indeed, have said they believed it." Boswell: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides Link 339. Religion I said, "Would not the same objection hold against the Trinity as against transubstantiation?" "Yes," said he, "if you take three and one in the same sense. If you do, to be sure you cannot believe it: but the three persons in the Godhead are Three in one sense, and One in another. We cannot tell how; and that is the mystery!" Boswell: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides Link 354. Religion "I am no friend to making religion appear too hard. Many good people have done harm, by giving severe notions of it." Boswell: Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides Link 410. Religion "If liberty of conscience be a natural right, we have no power to withhold it; if it be an indulgence, it may be allowed to papists, while it is not denied to other sects." Johnson: The Patriot Link 501. Religion "It is no limitation of [the Creator's] omnipotence ... to suppose that one thing is not consistent with another, that the same proposition cannot be at once true and false, that the same number cannot be even and odd, that cogitation cannot be conferred on that which is created incapable of cogitation." Johnson: Rasselas [Imlac] Note: If you haven't read it yet, please read this note of caution regarding quotes from Rasselas. Link 512. Religion "The great task of him who conducts his life by the precepts of religion is to make the future predominate over the present, to impress upon his mind so strong a sense of the importance of obedience to the divine will, of the value of the reward promised to virtue, and the terrors of the punishment denounced against crimes, as may overbear all the temptations which temporal hope or fear can bring in its way, and enable him to bid equal defiance to joy and sorrow, to turn away at one time from the allurements of ambition, and push forward at another against the threats of calamity." Johnson: Rambler #7 (April 10, 1750) Link 515. After-Life; Contemplation; Piety; Religion; Retreat; Temptation ...it appears, upon a philosophical estimate, that, supposing the mind, at any certain time, in an equipoise between the pleasures of this life and the hopes of futurity, present objects falling more frequently into the scale would in time preponderate, and that our regard for an invisible state would grow every moment weaker, till at last it would lose all its activity, and become absolutely without effect. To prevent this dreadful event, the balance is put into our own hands, and we have power to transfer the weight to either side. The motives to a life of holiness are infinite, not less than the favour or anger of Omnipotence, not less than eternity of happiness or misery. But these can only influence our conduct as they gain our attention, which the business or diversions of the world are always calling off by contrary attractions. The great art of piety, and the end for which all the arts of religion seem to be instituted, is the perpetual renovation of the motives to virtue, by a voluntary employment of our mind in the contemplation of its excellence, its importance, and its necessity, which, in proportion as they are more frequently and more willingly resolved, gain a more forcible and permanent influence, till in time they become the reigning ideas, the standing principles of action, and the test by which every thing proposed to the judgment is rejected or approved. To facilitate this change of our affections it is necessary that we weaken the temptations of the world, by retiring at certain seasons from it; for its influence arising only from its presence is much lessened when it becomes the object of solitary meditation. A constant residence amidst noise and pleasure inevitably obliterates the impressions of piety, and a frequent abstraction of ourselves into a state where this life, like the next, operates only upon the reason, will reinstate religion in its just authority, even without those irradiations from above, the hope of which I have no intention to withdraw from the sincere and the diligent. Johnson: Rambler #7 (April 10, 1750) Link 705. Argument; Friendsip; Politics; Religion "It cannot but be extremely difficult to preserve private kindness in the midst of public opposition, in which it will necessarily be involved a thousand incidents, extending their influence to conversation and privacy. Men engaged, by moral or religious motives, in contrary parties will generally look with different eyes upon every man, and decide almost every question upon different principles. When such occasions of dispute happen, to comply is to betray our cause, and to maintain friendship by ceasing to deserve it; to be silent is to lose the happiness and dignity of independence, to live in perpetual constraint, and to desert, if not to betray; and who shall determine which of two friends shall yield, where neither believes himself mistaken, and both confess the importance of their question? What then remains but contradiction and debate? and from those what can be what can be expected but acrimony and vehemence, the insolence of triumph, the vexation of defeat, and, in time, a weariness of contest, and an extinction of benevolence? Exchange of endearments and intercourse of civility may continue, indeed, as boughs may for a while be verdant when the root is wounded; but the poison of discord is infused, and though the countenance may preserve its smile, the heart is hardening and contracting." Johnson: Rambler #64 (October 27, 1750) Link 753. Religion "Malevolence to the clergy is seldom at a great distance from irreverence of religion." Johnson: Dryden (Lives of the Poets) Link 780. Old Age; Religion "However age may discourage us by its appearance from considering it in prospect, we shall all by degrees certainly be old; and therefore we ought to inquire what provision can be made against that time of distress? what happiness can be stored up against the winter of life? and how we may pass our latter years with serenity and cheerfulness? ...Piety is the only proper and adequate relief of decaying man. He that grows old without religious hopes, as he declines into imbecility, and feels pains and sorrows incessantly crowding upon him, falls into a gulf of bottomless misery, in which every reflection must plunge him deeper, and where he finds only new gradations of anguish and precipices of horror." Johnson: Rambler #69 (November 13, 1750) Link 924. Humility; Religion; Simplicity "Of the divine Author of our religion it is impossible to peruse the evangelical histories, without observing how little he favoured the vanity of inquisitiveness; how much more rarely he condescended to satisfy curiosity than to relieve distress; and how much he desired that his followers should rather excel in goodness than in knowledge. His precepts tend immediately to the rectification of the moral principles, and the direction of daily conduct, without ostentation, without art, at once irrefragable and plain; such as well meaning simplicity may readily conceive, and of which we cannot mistake the meaning, but when we are afraid to find it." Johnson: Rambler #81 (December 25, 1750) Link 1,035. Religion "To be of no church is dangerous. Religion, of which the rewards are distant and which is animated only by Faith and Hope, will glide by degrees out of the mind unless it be invigorated and reimpressed by external ordinances, by stated calls to worship, and the salutary influence of example." Johnson: Milton (Lives of the Poets) Link 1,048. Humility; Religion "The sentiments and worship proper to a fallen and offending being we have all to learn, as we have all to practise." Johnson: Milton (Lives of the Poets) Link 1,157. Religion "The duties of religion, sincerely and regularly performed, will always be sufficient to exalt the meanest and to exercise the highest understanding. That mind will never be vacant which is frequently recalled by stated duties to meditations on eternal interests; nor can any hour be long which is spent in obtaining some new qualification for celestial happiness." Johnson: Rambler #124 (May 25, 1751) Link 1,394. Religion; Sacrifice "It may be observed in general that the future is purchased by the present. It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification. This is so evidently true with regard to the whole of our existence that all precepts of theology have no other tendency than to enforce a life of faith; a life regulated not by our senses but by our belief; a life in which pleasures are to be refused for fear of invisible punishments, and calamities sometimes to be sought, and always endured, in hope of rewards that shall be obtained in another state." Johnson: Rambler #178 (November 30, 1751) Link