“Eternity, the various sentence past, Assigns the sever’d throng distinct abodes, _Sulphureous_ or _ambrosial_.”
Exquisite delicacy of indication! He is too nice to be specific as to the interior of the “sulphureous” abode; but when once half the human race are shut up there, hear how he enjoys turning the key on them!
“What ensues? The deed predominant, the deed of deeds! Which makes a hell of hell, a _heaven of heaven_! The goddess, with determin’d aspect turns Her adamantine key’s enormous size Through Destiny’s inextricable wards, _Deep driving every bolt_ on both their fates. Then, from the crystal battlements of heaven, Down, down she hurls it through the dark profound, Ten thousand, thousand fathom; there to rust And ne’er unlock her resolution more. The deep resounds; and Hell, through all her glooms, Returns, in groans, the melancholy roar.”
This is one of the blessings for which Dr. Young thanks God “most:”
“For all I bless thee, most, for the severe; Her death—my own at hand—_the fiery gulf_, _That flaming bound of wrath omnipotent_! _It thunders_;—_but it thunders to preserve_; . . . its wholesome dread Averts the dreaded pain; _its hideous groans_ _Join Heaven’s sweet Hallelujahs in Thy praise_, Great Source of good alone! How kind in all! In vengeance kind! Pain, Death, Gehenna, _save_” . . .
_i.e._, save _me_, Dr. Young, who, in return for that favor, promise to give my divine patron the monopoly of that exuberance in laudatory epithet, of which specimens may be seen at any moment in a large number of dedications and odes to kings, queens, prime ministers, and other persons of distinction. _That_, in Young’s conception, is what God delights in. His crowning aim in the “drama” of the ages, is to vindicate his own renown. The God of the “Night Thoughts” is simply Young himself “writ large”—a didactic poet, who “lectures” mankind in the antithetic hyperbole of mortal and immortal joys, earth and the stars, hell and heaven; and expects the tribute of inexhaustible “applause.” Young has no conception of religion as anything else than egoism turned heavenward; and he does not merely imply this, he insists on it. Religion, he tells us, in argumentative passages too long to quote, is “ambition, pleasure, and the love of gain,” directed toward the joys of the future life instead of the present. And his ethics correspond to his religion. He vacillates, indeed, in his ethical theory, and shifts his position in order to suit his immediate purpose in argument; but he never changes his level so as to see beyond the horizon of mere selfishness. Sometimes he insists, as we have seen, that the belief in a future life is the only basis of morality; but elsewhere he tells us—