ye would that others should do unto you.’  All questions appertaining to this point were from that time to be decided by the precise statements contained in these statutes at large.  But their mere publication sufficed to make an incredible number of infidels in the authority of the commission.  Such a voluminous rule, they truly said, could be no rule at all, and could be fruitful of nothing but everlasting litigation.  If (they admitted) general maxims had been as briefly as possible laid down, and men’s common sense had been left to interpret and apply them with the requisite restrictions, there would be much more to be said for their divine origin.  But on such a system, no man, if he lived for a thousand years, could tell what his duty was.  Many complained that, before they found the rule for which they were in search, the time for its application had passed away.  Many excused themselves from complying with the dictates of justice and charity, because they could not discover the cases that related to their special circumstances; some even denied that the rules could have been devised by heavenly wisdom, because, having carefully studied the whole of the seventy-five volumes, they did not hesitate to say, that there were many cases which had not been provided for at all!

I was so amused with this last disastrous attempt to construct a revelation, that I laughed outright, and in so doing awoke.  I found that my lamp was fast going out; so, dismissing the innocent volume of Leibnitz which had suggested all these incongruities, I went to bed; firmly convinced that the shadows of men in the “Paradise of Fools” are about as wise and ingenious as are men themselves. ____

July 28.  I had this morning some curious, and, if it had not been for the grave importance of the subject, amusing conversation with Mr. Fellowes on his views, or rather his no views, respecting a “future life.”  He said he wished he could make up his mind whether the doctrine was true; also whether, as some of his favorite writers supposed, it was of no “spiritual” importance to decide it.  I said it certainly did seem of some importance.  I reminded him of Pascal’s saying, that he could excuse men’s contented ignorance with any thing rather than that.  “They are not obliged,” says he, “to examine the Copernican system; but it is vital to the whole of existence to ascertain whether the soul is mortal or not.”

“Mr. Newman,” said Fellowes, “thinks very differently:  but then his whole mind is differently constituted from Pascal’s.”

I admitted it, of course.

“Mr. Newman’s views,” he continued, “on the subject, certainly do not quite satisfy me; and yet they are very sublime.  If he has any hope in this matter, (of which he appears not absolutely destitute,) it is from the sheer strength of a ‘faith’ which triumphs over all obstacles, or rather hangs upon nothing.  He ridicules all intellectual proofs, and at the same time declares that his ‘spiritual insight’ deserts him.  It is a faith pure from all reason, and from all ‘insight’ too.  As to insight in this matter, I must agree with him, that, to ascertain the fact of a future life by ‘direct vision,’ is ‘to me hitherto impossible.’”