No More Learning

{**} Yet,
on the arrival of the modern Europeans in India, innumerable were their
idols; and all the superstition of ancient Egypt, in the adoration of
animals and vegetables, seemed more than revived by the Brahmins. Who
that considers this striking alteration in their features, can withhold
his contempt when he is told of the religious care with which these
philosophers have these four thousand years preserved their sacred
rites.

{*} To these undoubted facts the author will not add the authority of a
Xavier, who tells us, that he prevailed upon a Brahmin to explain to him
some part of their hidden religion; when to his surprise, the Indian, in
a low voice, repeated the Ten Commandments.

{**} . . . ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? . --EUSEB.
Prep. Evan. lib. 6, c. 10, p. 275. Ed. Paris, 1628.

[650] _Thee, Thomas, thee, the plaintive Ganges mourn'd. _--The
versification of the original is here exceedingly fine. Even those who
are unacquainted with the Portuguese may perceive it.

"Choraraote Thome, o Gange, o Indo,
Choroute toda a terra, que pizaste;
Mas mais te chorao as almas, que vestindo
Se hiao da Santa Fe, que lhe ensinaste;
Mas os anjos do ceo cantando, & rindo,
Te recebem na gloria que ganhaste. "


[651] _Like him, ye Lusians, simplest Truth pursue. _--It is now time to
sum up what has been said of the labours of the Jesuits. Diametrically
opposite to this advice was their conduct in every Asiatic country where
they pretended to propagate the gospel. Sometimes we find an individual
sincere and pious, but the great principle which always actuated them as
a united body was the lust of power and secular emolument, the
possession of which they thought could not be better secured than by
rendering themselves of the utmost importance to the see of Rome. In
consequence of these principles, wherever they came their first care was
to find what were the great objects of the fear and adoration of the
people. If the sun was esteemed the giver of life, Jesus Christ was the
Son of that luminary, and they were his younger brethren, sent to
instruct the ignorant. If the barbarians were in dread of evil spirits,
Jesus Christ came on purpose to banish them from the world, had driven
them from Europe,{*} and the Jesuits were sent to the East to complete
his unfinished mission. If the Indian converts still retained a
veneration for the powder of burned cow-dung, the Jesuits made the sign
of the cross over it, and the Indian besmeared himself with it as usual.
Heaven, or universal matter, they told the Chinese, was the God of the
Christians, and the sacrifices of Confucius were solemnized in the
churches of the Jesuits. This worship of Confucius, Voltaire, with his
wonted accuracy, denies. But he ought to have known that this, with the
worship of _tien_, or heaven, had been long complained of at the court
of Rome (see Dupin), and that after the strictest scrutiny the charge
was fully proved, and Clement XI. , in 1703, sent Cardinal Tournon to the
small remains of the Jesuits in the East with a papal decree to reform
these abuses. But the cardinal, soon after his arrival, was poisoned in
Siam by the holy fathers. Xavier, and the other Jesuits who succeeded
him, by the dexterous use of the great maxims of their master Loyola,
_Omnibus omnia, et omnia munda mundis_, gained innumerable proselytes.
They contradicted none of the favourite opinions of their converts, they
only baptized, and gave them crucifixes to worship, and all was well.
But their zeal in uniting to the see of Rome the Christians found in the
East descended to the minutest particulars. And the native Christians of
Malabar were so violently persecuted as heretics that the heathen
princes took arms in their defence in 1570 (see Geddes, Hist. Malabar),
and the Portuguese were almost driven from India. Abyssinia, by the same
arts, was steeped in blood, and two or three Abyssinian emperors lost
their lives in endeavouring to establish the pope's supremacy. An order
at last was given from the throne to hang every missionary, without
trial, wherever apprehended, the emperor himself complaining that he
could not enjoy a day in quiet for the intrigues of the Romish friars.
In China, also, they soon rendered themselves insufferable. Their skill
in mathematics and the arts introduced them to great favour at court,
but all their cunning could not conceal their villainy. Their
unwillingness to ordain the natives raised suspicions against a
profession thus monopolized by strangers; their earnest zeal in amassing
riches, and their interference with, and deep designs on, secular power
(the fatal rock on which they have so often been shipwrecked), appeared,
and their churches were levelled with the ground. About 90,000 of the
new converts, together with their teachers, were massacred, and their
religion was prohibited. In Japan the rage of government even exceeded
that of China, and in allusion to their chief object of adoration, the
cross, several of the Jesuit fathers were crucified by the Japanese, and
the revival of the Christian name was interdicted by the severest laws.
Thus, in a great measure, ended in the East the labours of the society
of Ignatius Loyola, a society which might have diffused the greatest
blessings to mankind, could honesty have been added to their great
learning and abilities. Had that indefatigable zeal which laboured to
promote the interests of their own brotherhood and the Roman see been
employed in the real interests of humanity and civilization, the great
design of diffusing the law of Heaven, challenged by its author as the
purpose of the Lusiad, would have been amply completed, and the remotest
hordes of Tartary and Africa ere now had been happily civilized. But
though the Jesuits have failed, they have afforded a noble lesson to
mankind.

"Though fortified with all the brazen mounds
That art can rear, and watch'd by eagle eyes,
Still will some rotten part betray the structure
That is not bas'd on simple honesty. "

{*} This trick, it is said, has been played in America within these
twenty years, where the notion of evil spirits gives the poor Indians
their greatest misery. The French Jesuits told the Six Nations, that
Jesus Christ was a Frenchman, and had driven all evil demons from
France; that he had a great love for the Indians, whom he intended also
to deliver, but taking England in his way, he was crucified by the
wicked Londoners.

[652] _The dying. _--The innumerable superstitions performed on the banks
of the river Ganges, afford a pitiable picture of the weakness of
humanity. The circumstances here mentioned are literally true. It is no
uncommon scene for the English ships to be surrounded with the corpses
which come floating down this hallowed stream.

[653]

_Pegu, whose sons (so held old faith) confess'd
A dog their sire. --_

The tradition of this country boasted this infamous and impossible
original. While other nations pretend to be descended of demi-gods, the
Peguans were contented to trace their pedigree from a Chinese woman and
a dog; the only living creatures which survived a shipwreck on their
coast. --See Faria.

[654] _A pious queen their horrid rage restrain'd. _--Thus in the
original:

"Aqui soante arame no instrumento
Da geracao costumao, o que usarao
Por manha da Raynha, que inventando
Tal uso, deitou fora o error nefando. "


[655] _And 'mid white whirlpools down the ocean driven. _--See the same
account of Sicily, Virg. AEn. iii.

[656] _Ophir its Tyrian name. _--Sumatra has been by some esteemed the
Ophir of the Holy Scriptures; but the superior fineness of the gold of
Sofala, and its situation, favour the claim of that Ethiopian isle. --See
Bochart. Geog. Sacr.

[657] _And thousands more. _--The extensive countries between India and
China, where Ptolemy places his man-eaters, and where Mandevylle found
"men without heads, who saw and spoke through holes in their breasts,"
continues still very imperfectly known. The Jesuits have told many
extravagant lies of the wealth of these provinces. By the most authentic
accounts they seem to have been peopled by colonies from China. The
religion and manufactures of the Siamese, in particular, confess the
resemblance. In some districts, however, they have greatly degenerated
from the civilization of the mother country.

[658] _And gnaw the reeking limbs. _--Much has been said on this subject,
some denying and others asserting the existence of anthropophagi or
man-eaters. Porphyry (de Abstin. i. 4 ? 21{*}) says that the Massagetae
and Derbices (people of north-eastern Asia), esteeming those most
miserable who died of sickness, when their parents and relations grew
old, killed and ate them, holding it more honourable thus to consume
them than that they should be destroyed by vermin. St. Jerome has
adopted this word for word, and has added to it an authority of his own:
"Quid loquar," says he, (Adv. Jov. l. 2, c. 6), "de caeteris nationibus;
cum ipse adolescentulus in Gallia viderim Scotos, gentem Britannicam,
humanis vesci carnibus, et cum per sylvas porcorum greges et armentorum,
pecudumque reperiant, pastorum nates, et faeminarum papillas solere
abscindere, et has solas ciborum delicias arbitrari? " Mandevylle ought
next to be cited. "Aftirwarde men gon be many yles be see unto a yle
that men clepen Milhe: there is a full cursed peple: thei delyten in ne
thing more than to fighten and to fie men, and to drynken gladlyest
mannes blood, which they clepen Dieu. "--P. 235. Yet, whatever absurdity
may appear on the face of these tales; and what can be more absurd than
to suppose that a few wild Scots or Irish (for the name was then proper
to Ireland), should so lord it in Gaul, as to eat the breasts of the
women and the hips of the shepherds? Yet, whatever absurdities our
Mandevylles may have obtruded on the public, the evidence of the fact is
not thereby wholly destroyed. Though Dampier and other visitors of
barbarous nations have assured us that they never met with any
man-eaters, and though Voltaire has ridiculed the opinion, yet one may
venture the assertion of their existence, without partaking of a
credulity similar to that of those foreigners, who believed that the men
of Kent were born with tails like sheep (see Lambert's Peramb.
), the
punishment inflicted upon them for the murder of Thomas a Becket. Many
are the credible accounts, that different barbarous nations used to eat
their prisoners of war. According to the authentic testimony of the best
Portuguese writers, the natives of Brazil, on their high festivals,
brought forth their captives, and after many barbarous ceremonies, at
last roasted and greedily devoured their mangled limbs. During his
torture the unhappy victim prided himself in his manly courage,
upbraiding their want of skill in the art of tormenting, and telling his
murderers that his belly had been the grave of many of their relations.
Thus the fact was certain long before a late voyage discovered the
horrid practice in New Zealand. To drink human blood has been more
common. The Gauls and other ancient nations practised it. When
Magalhaens proposed Christianity to the King of Subo, a north-eastern
Asiatic island, and when Francis de Castro discovered Santigana and
other islands, a hundred leagues north of the Moluccas, the conversion
of their kings was confirmed by each party drinking of the blood of the
other. Our poet Spenser tells us, in his View of the State of Ireland,
that he has seen the Irish drink human blood, particularly, he adds, "at
the execution of a notable traitor at Limerick, called Murrogh O'Brien,
I saw an old woman, who was his foster-mother, take up his head whilst
he was quartering and suck up all the blood that run thereout, saying,
that the earth was not worthy to drink it, and therewith also steeped
her face and breast and tore her hair, crying out and shrieking most
terribly. " It is worthy of regard that the custom of marking themselves
with hot irons, and tattooing, is characteristic both of the Guios of
Camoens and of the present inhabitants of New Zealand. And if, as its
animals indicate, the island of Otaheite was first peopled by a
shipwreck, the friendship existing in a small society might easily
obliterate the memory of one custom, while the less unfriendly one of
tattooing was handed down, a memorial that they owed their origin to the
north-eastern parts of Asia, where that custom particularly prevails.

{*} ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ?
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? .

[659] _Other worlds the souls of beasts receive. _--That Queen Elizabeth
reigned in England, is not more certain than that the most ignorant
nations in all ages have had the idea of a state after death. The same
faculty which is conscious of existence whispers the wish for it; and,
so little acquainted with the deductions of reasoning have some tribes
been, that not only their animals, but even the ghosts of their domestic
utensils have been believed to accompany them to the islands of the
blessed. Long ere the voice of philosophy was heard, the opinion of an
after state was popular in Greece. The works of Homer bear incontestable
evidence of this. And there is not a feature in the history of the human
mind better ascertained, than that no sooner did speculation seize upon
the topic, than belief declined, and, as the great Bacon observes, the
most learned, became the most atheistical ages. The reason of this is
obvious. While the human mind is all simplicity, popular opinion is
cordially received; but, when reasoning begins, proof is expected, and
deficiency of demonstration being perceived, doubt and disbelief
naturally follow. Yet, strange as it may appear, if the writer's memory
does not greatly deceive him, these certain facts were denied by Hobbes.
If he is not greatly mistaken, that gentleman, who gave a wretched, a
most unpoetical translation of Homer, has so grossly misunderstood his
author, as to assert that his mention of a future state was not in
conformity to the popular opinion of his age, but only his own poetical
fiction. He might as well have assured us, that the sacrifices of Homer
had never any existence in Greece. But, as no absurdity is too gross for
some geniuses, our murderer of Homer, our Hobbes, has likewise asserted,
that the belief of the immortality of the human soul was the child of
pride and speculation, unknown in Greece till long after the appearance
of the Iliad.

[660] _Oh gentle Mecon. _--It was on the coast of Cochin-China, at the
mouth of this river, the Maekhaun, or Camboja of modern writers, that
Camoens suffered the unhappy shipwreck which rendered him the sport of
fortune during the remainder of his life. The literal rendering of the
Portuguese, which Mickle claims the liberty of improving, is, "On his
gentle, hospitable bosom shall he receive the song, wet from woful,
unhappy shipwreck, escaped from destroying tempests, from ravenous
dangers, the effect of the unjust sentence upon him whose lyre shall be
more renowned than enriched. "--_Ed. _

[661] _Here ere the cannon's rage in Europe roar'd. _--According to Le
Comte's memoirs of China, and those of other travellers, the mariner's
compass, fire-arms, and printing were known in that empire, long ere the
invention of these arts in Europe. But the accounts of Du Halde, Le
Comte, and the other Jesuits, are by no means to be depended on. It was
their interest (in order to gain credit in Europe and at the court of
Rome) to magnify the splendour of the empire where their mission lay,
and they have magnified it into romance itself. It is pretended, that
the Chinese used fire-arms in their wars with Zenghis Khan, and
Tamerlane; but it is also said that the Sogdians used cannon against
Alexander. The mention of any sulphurous composition in an old writer
is, with some, immediately converted into a regular tire of artillery.
The Chinese, indeed, on the first arrival of Europeans, had a kind of
mortars, which they called fire-pans, but they were utter strangers to
the smaller fire-arms. Verbiest, a Jesuit, was the first who taught them
to make brass cannon, set upon wheels. And, even so late as the hostile
menace which Anson gave them, they knew not how to level, or manage,
their ordnance to any advantage. Their printing is, indeed, much more
ancient than that of Europe, but it does not deserve the same name, the
blocks of wood with which they stamp their sheets being as inferior to
as they are different from the movable types of Europe. The Chinese have
no idea of the graces of fine writing; here, most probably, the fault
exists in their language; but the total want of nature in their
painting, and of symmetry in their architecture, in both of which they
have so long been experienced, afford a heavy accusation against their
genius. But, in planning gardens, and in the art of beautifying the face
of their country, they are unequalled. Yet, even in their boasted
gardening their genius stands accused. The art of ingrafting, so long
known to Europe, is still unknown to them. And hence their fruits are
vastly inferior in flavour to those of the western world. The amazing
wall of defence against the Tartars, though 1500 miles in extent, is a
labour inferior to the canals, lined on the sides with hewn stone, which
everywhere enrich, and adorn their country; some of which reach 1000
miles, and are of depth to carry vessels of burthen.