from the vibration of an old sword set in motion at Adam's fall, but officially stopped some eighteen hundred years ago. The old tremor of the old danger quells our souls and prevents our taking courage to face-a phantom, an exploded engine of destruction, an expiated punishment.

Death makes no difference to our real selves, Asgill teaches us. 'When the people flocked about Lazarus, expecting to hear from him some news of the other world, he could give them no other account of it than, "Whereas I was dead, now I am alive." He was neither richer nor wiser by his resurrection, nor could learn by that how to escape another death; but died again, and might have thus died and rose, and rose and died, a hundred times without any change of his state."

According to Asgill's showing, there may yet be hope for us generally in the way of baffling death. Elijah once courted death, when he said: 'Now, Lord, take away my life, for I am not better than my

fathers.' 'Which shows that he was not educated in the faith of translation, but attained it afterwards by study. For no man can comprehend the heights and depths of the Gospel at his first entrance into it; and, in point of order, the last enemy to be destroyed is death. The first essay of faith is against hell, that, though we should die, we might not be damned. And the full assurance of this is more than most men attain to before death overtakes them, which makes death a terror to them.' In course of time, then, by this reasoning, we shall be able to confront and vanquish death; for we have already, in this later generation, made a much mightier assault upon the notion of hell than did the philosophy of Asgill's time. And he allows that a little time may be required in order that we may summon our courage to withstand the ancient enemy.

In spite of his crotchets, his philosophical notions are far from contemptible. Here is one of them:

All life is motion, and therefore cannot be eternal without an eternal motion. For whenever it comes to stagnate, the patient rots, and stinks and dies.

The most pleasant enjoyments (being kept long in our hands) pall our appetites to them. And hence the smallest addition to what we had before seems greater riches to us than all our former possessions. And every new thought that falls into our studies proves a greater diversion to us than all our former knowledge.

Now in all inventions of men towards

perpetuity of motion, they never attempt anything beyond a circle, which moving itself by rotation comes to the same place again. But the motion calculated for the maintenance of eternal life is made to move in a direct ascent for ever; in reach of which we see, and taste, and feel what we never did before. I shall give him shall be a spring of living water, rising up to everlasting life.

every

The water that

'What, then, is death ?' asks our Wondrous Asgill, and he answers himself: Why, 'tis a misfortune and from which he hath not yet fallen upon man from the beginning, dared to attempt his recovery. And it serves as a spectrum to fright us into a little better life than (perhaps) we should lead without it.' This

barrister-theologian then sums up in true legal fashion:

Wherefore (notwithstanding this inundation of death in the world, and the infection of fear contracted upon man from hence) I am not affrighted from reassuming my assertion at the beginning:

That this long possession of death over man is a possession against right.

That the length of this possession is no foreclosure of the right of man to live. claim with effect may recover this right, And that he that dares prosecute his and avoid that possession.

thing that puzzled and made uneasy the theologians of his time: 'And if, after this, I die like other men, I declare myself to die of no religion.' This in A.D. 1700 was sufficient basis for a charge of atheism. But he proceeds: 'And in this let no one be concerned for me as a Desperade: for I am not going to renounce the other parts of our religion, but to add another article of faith to it, without which I can't understand the rest; and if I lose this additional article by failing in this attempt, I have as much religion left still as they that pity me.' But in this very volume we seem to have evidence that these paradoxes and crotchets are but husks overlying a deep and well-rooted spiritual faith. For example, in the words we italicise in the follow

ing: 'I am not making myself wings to fly to heaven with, but only making myself ready for that conveyance which shall be sent me. In which I don't pretend any privilege over other men that are or will be ready with me, which (it seems, they say themselves) they are not, nor shall be, till the resurrection at the last day.' He concludes his Argument in a spirit half-defiant, half-tender:

However, let us part friends, and every one make the best of his way. And if I should lose myself in this untrodden path of life, I can still find out the beaten road of death blindfold. . . . If therefore (as I have said before) after this, I go the way of my fathers, I freely waive that haughty epitaph

Magnis tamen excidit ausis. And instead of that, knock under table, That Satan hath beguiled me to play the fool with myself. In which, however, he hath shewed his masterpiece, for I defy the whole clan of hell to form another lie so like truth as this is. But if I act my

motto, and go the way of an eagle in the air, then have I played a trump upon death, and shewed myself a match for the devil.... Whoever thinks that anything herein contained is not fair dealing with God and man (and giving the devil himself his due), let him, or her, burn this book, and cast a stone at him that wrote it.

Poor Asgill! after thirty years' imprisonment, and after losing his wife, his friends, his money, and all the purposes of his life, he must have been, one would imagine, only too willing to succumb to death in the ordinary manner. The pain of a caged bird can be but little by the side of that of an active brain doomed to no object but the walls of a prison. He published a few works on various subjects, it is true, during his incarceration, in which is to be found no little good sense, as, for instance, in his Essay for the Press (1712). He argues as follows:

That there should be a restraint upon the press seems a matter of necessity; but the manner of it, a matter of debate.

The use and intent of printing is (the same with that of preaching) for com

municating our thoughts to others. And there is equal reason (in itself) for suppressing the one as the other..

But the present licentiousness being chiefly occasioned by concealing the names of the authors,

The most just and natural remedy seems by prohibiting the prints without the names of the authors to them.

As the press is now used, it is a paper Inquisition, by which any man may be arraigned, judged, and condemned (ay! and broad hints given for his execution too), without ever knowing his accusers. . . .

Asgill's confinement, too, was not so close but that he could now and then transact little scraps of legal business as well as publish an occaBut the chain, sional pamphlet. borne for so many years, must have been sorely galling, nevertheless. It is a strange figure to look upon, that of this old man, unbowed by the hootings of a nation or the oppression of captivity. 'He had,' we learn, something extremely singular in his person, his air, his dress, and his manner of speaking; his conversation was inexpressibly lively and entertaining, and his vivacity continued, in spite of old age and infirmities, to the last.

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He had a very unaccountable contempt for money, parting

with it readily on all occasions, though he acquired it hardly.' A A sphinx was very appropriately the Asgill crest, and the motto affixed might have been specially composed for this particular member of the family. Sui oblitus commodi, taken in the ordinary sense, may characterise Asgill through life. We find it stated that Asgill was born at Leeds, of parents in a middle state of life, and that after receiving a good education he was sent up to London to make his fortune. Though he failed to accomplish this, there was yet something of the Lancashire spirit about him; he was shrewd and long-headed, earnest and full of life, pithy in writing, and drily witty in conversation: a true son of the North.

In Sir Wm. Musgrave's MS. Obituary we find him styled John Asgyl, prosecuted for blasphemy 1703, called translated Asgyl'; and the date of his death is there recorded as November 10, 1738, his age being stated at a hundred. In the Gentleman's Magazine this, as some would say, impossible age, is brought down to 'near a hundred,' and in the Biographia Britannica to upwards of ourscore.' Might there not be some plausibility in speculating that the bodily fibre and force, which this extreme tenacity of life would argue him to have been possessed of, tended to foster, if not to suggest, his views on the cowardliness of dying? But we cannot set at nought the reality of his spiritual creed.

In all Asgill's writings there are to be found some noteworthy morsels; and he wrote on a variety of subjects: An Abstract of the Public Funds; an essay upon Charity; a question upon Divorce; a Treatise on the creation of another species of Money than Gold and Silver; a work on the Nature of the Kingdom of God Within Us; a memorial on the Court of Marshalsea; an article on the South Sea Scheme; a vindica

tion of the Succession of the House of Hanover; an article on a Bill relating to Peerage; and a little work advocating the Registry of Lands. These works on subjects so dissimilar are certainly evidence of the versatile and active character of his mind. The question as to the registry of lands is interesting, because, though so many advocate the adoption of such a system, we have not yet grown wise enough to avail ourselves of it.

One thing Asgill hated-Roman Catholicism; and one thing he was enthusiastic about the Hanoverian Succession. He is very brusque with the Roman Catholics: 'Paul was not a Roman Catholic,' he told them, 'for he had not found out the jingle of Peter's name (Cephas).' He tells them, too, À shilling counted twenty times is but twelve pence, and Ave Maria repeated a hundred times is but Ave Maria still, and Paternoster said over never so often is but one prayer.'

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He says to his opponents that he has this charity for all the world, that they had rather have the Spirit of God than the spirit of the devil (if there were no trouble in the exchange).'

And some of his observations are worth having. Here is a fragment from The Nature of the Kingdom of God Within Us: 'The natural life of man is as a mechanism, which can move no longer than the force or power that maintains it continues. And though some of the strings in that motion are longer than others, yet they all wind down at last, and then the motion stops or stagnates.' From this he turns to a consideration of the spiritual life: "The mind or soul of man is capable of transformation without change of his body; and so far as the mind or soul is thus transformed in this world, man is so far in his journey towards the new Jerusalem, and is so far entered into the other world; and thus the mind or soul of man

enters Heaven during the life of the body.' This, it will be observed, is a much more reasonable and elevated faith than that in corporeal translation. The work from which it is quoted was published eighteen years later than the Argument for Translation.

It would appear as if Asgill had early received some vision of a great light; that this light first endeavoured to manifest itself through the narrow channels of a popular and imperfectly comprehended system; and that afterwards the bandages fell off, and it was given to Asgill to see clearly sometimes how far and in what direction he was being led. His notion, so powerfully argued, of corporeal translation, has doubtless, from its sensational character, cast into the shadow the finer portions of his creed. In the only sensible pamphlet written against his work on Translation, it is argued that we have a mysterical body,' that the soul is this body, and that this is the body which is translated. With this view Asgill in his later years would have agreed; indeed, it is not so dissimilar to the purport of the last quotation we have made from his work published in 1718. But, leaving out the question of body, corporeal or spiritual, Asgill's chief force is directed against the cowardliness of dying. In 1727 he published a volume, the assertion of which is:

That the last day, and the second coming of the Son of man, and the first resurrection, did commence together, by and from the death and resurrection of Christ from the dead.

And that the reason or cause of the discontinuance, demur, or delay of any further proceedings in that first resurrection, hath been, and still is, for want of a proper faith

on the earth for that purpose.

Asgill's genius and idiosyncrasies must have made a considerable impression upon his contemporaries. A little work was even published in

VOL. IV.-NO. XX. NEW SERIES.

1712 on his literary style. It is entitled An Imitation of the New Way of Writing introduced by the learned Mr. Asgill. The following was the recipe for counterfeiting it: 'For if you do now and then ask a pert question by way of surprise, and follow it up close with another; then stitch all up together at the bottom with a sentence in the form of an aphorism (and if you can conveniently let that line be shorter than the rest), you have the secret as sure as ever Van Helmont had the philosopher's stone.'

On the whole, Asgill does not deserve to be forgotten. His noble crotchets, quaint puzzling paradoxes, and vivid faith; his wonderful pluck and sang-froid, his absolute sincerity, his inability to bend to a compromise, his utter absence of worldly-mindedness, and his remarkable logical dexterity-these shadow him forth as a distinctive figure that of a man we feel we should like to become better acquainted with. He is a strange compound in creed of what we should now style Swedenborgianism and of views held by those whom we should to-day call advanced Christians. To the latter section of thought would belong his faith in the Christian scheme only on the basis of its universality. With the former system he has much in common. The quotations we have made show him to have been a believer in an infinite progression as the soul's life for eternity; to have looked on the heavenly kingdom as a state of soul, not a locality. Again, he asserts his belief, with the great apostle, that the things on earth are but the patterns of things in the heavens, where the originals are kept.' The Swedenborgians apply this doctrine to music, to flowers, to sunlight, or to any of the beautiful things of the earth. And though such a creed may easily be characterised as being 'too nimble in one's faith,' that would certainly seem preferable

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to the being too slow. That rigid little sect, too, which is known under the name of the Plymouth Brethren,' may possibly take an interest in Asgill. These people hold translation as one of their chief tenets, but, as we learn, were under the impression that prominence had never been given to it as a doctrine until near the end of the eighteenth century, when a certain 'Conference of a few godly men' met together at Westminster. The 'Brethren' base their faith upon a verse in one of Paul's Epistles (1 Thess. iv. 17); and their technical term for translation is the Rapture of the Saints at the Premillennial Advent, when they hold that the Saints, going forth like the nobles of a city to greet their sovereign and mingle with his retinue, will be caught up to meet their Lord in the air, in order to descend with Him. On this 'morning without clouds' there is to be no decay or leaving behind of the corporeal body, but by a glorified change thereof, a certain section of humanity self-styled the Church is by privilege of its saintship to 'go the way,' as Asgill puts it, of an eagle in the air.' The salt of the earth-according to the Brethren' -being thus removed, the unfortunates who remain are to ripen fast for judgment.' But Asgill would not agree with the Brethren, any more than they with him; and he appears, indeed, to have finally gone away from the doctrine of

corporeal translation. Asgill's conclusion might practically result in this, that we are actually immortal, if we desire immortality; that we are in a state of eternal life as much in kind, though not in degree, as we ever can be..

What appears to have greatly offended the orthodox of Asgill's day is a certain jocularity of expres sion that is evidently natural to him. But the seriousness at the root of his nature is thorough, beyond a doubt: indeed, he gives us the impression of having a faith much like William Blake's so much a part of his nature, and so deeply rooted within it, that he was somewhat careless as to the form into which he cast it. He possessed immense generosity, but no caution. Being too, as he was, intellectually in advance of the majority of his contemporaries, and consequently bereft of sympathy and looked upon as a madman, he seems to have been slightly affected in the balance of his mind. A thinker is liable to a certain weakness from isolation just as he gains strength by sympathy and support. Asgill, too, was subject to curious influences. This is how he describes himself writing: Having felt two powers within me all the time I have been about it: one bids me write and the other bobs my elbow.' If we were to be asked what these powers were, or which was which, as expressed in the writing when finished, it might be difficult to give a clear reply.

KENINGALE COок, В.А.