a candle; feared that she had thereby "committed the sin against the Holy Ghost," &c. I find the following case of perverted remorse in my memoranda. A man aged nearly seventy, of tall stature, thin habit of body, dark melancholic complexion, sensitive, humane, intelligent, temperate, but living in cohabitation-and having lived so for several years, was during many months of his last bedridden illness in a narrow, dark, and unwholesome apartment, evidently suffering from deep-seated remorse. Upon being urged to "open his grief," he said," I have, indeed, something on my mind. In my younger days I was a soldier, and served in the West Indies. While we were there, the troops thought themselves hardly used. Some of them mutinied. One of them shot an officer, and was sentenced by the courtmartial to be hanged. An offer was made of thirty shillings to any one who would act as executioner. I accepted the offer, and since I have been lying here, the thought of it comes into my mind day and night. I think I did wrong. The recollection of it distresses me more than anything I ever did. beside." He repeated the name of the soldier very mournfully, "Poor Joseph !" It appeared to me that his mind had conceived a mal-association with his deed, partly, at least, from the similarity of the sum of money to that received by Judas Iscariot for the betrayal of his master. He was much inclined to superstition, and told stories of what he considered to be retributions of Divine Providence in kind, which he had witnessed, in which, however, the resemblances seemed to be indistinct. Nor could he derive lasting consolation from any moral reasoning offered to him respecting the particular cause of his own mental sufferings could not be made sensible that he was living in sin. VI. The irrational and disproportioned nature of mere spurious remorse is thus depicted by one of the most eminent Puritan. divines. "In all other adversities a man is still a friend unto himself, favours himself, and reaches out his best considerations to bring in comfort to his heavy heart. But in this he is a Scourge to himself; at war with himself; an enemy to himself. He doth greedily and industriously fetch in as much matter as he can possibly, both imaginary and true, to enlarge the rent and aggravate his horror. He gazes willingly in that false glass which Satan (?) is wont in such cases to set before him, wherein by his hellish malice he makes an infinite addition both to the already unnumbered multitude and to the too great heinousness of his sins, and would fain, if he will be led by his lying, cruelly misrepresent to his affrighted imagination every gnat as a camel, every mote as a molehill, every molebill as a mountain; every lustful thought as the most unclean act, every idle word as a desperate blasphemy, every angry look as an actual murder, every intemperate passion as an inexpiable provocation, every distraction in holy duties as an absolute rebellion, every transgression against light of conscience as a sin against the Holy Ghost. Nay, in this amazedness of spirit and disposition to despair, he is apt, even of his own accord, and with great eagerness, to arm every sin as it comes into his mind with a particular sting, that it may strike deep enough, and stick fast enough, in his already grieved soul. He employs and improves the excellency and utmost of his learning, understanding, wit, memory, to argue with all subtlety, with much sophistry, against the pardonableness of his sins and possibility of salvation. He wounds even his wounds with a conceit that they are incurable, and vexes his very vexations with refusing to be comforted. Not only crosses, afflictions, temptations, and all matter of discontentment; but even the most desirable things also in this life, and those which minister most outward comfort; wife, children, friends, gold, goods, great men's favours, preferments, honours, offices, even pleasures themselves, everything: whatsoever is within him, or without him, or about him; whatsoever he thinks upon, remembers, hears, sees, turn all to his torment. No marvel, then, though the terror of a wounded conscience be so intolerable."* Can any one doubt whether the foregoing is not a description of spurious remorse? Nor is such a kind of remorse confined to Christians. The Mahometan doctor, Malêc Ebn Ans, who is said to have "paid great regard to the traditions of Mohammed," and was remarkable for the conscientiousness of his instructions, was in his last illness found in tears, and upon being asked the reason of it, answered, "How should I not weep? and who has more reason to weep than I? Would to God that for every question decided by me according to my own opinion I had received so many stripes! Then would my accounts be easier. Would to God I had never given any decision of my own!" It is also worthy of remark, that professed sceptics, even of the most intellectual order, have been equally liable to the inroads of remorse. Thus the ancient Epicureans themselves, who denied the intrinsic difference of human actions, all knowledge and concern of the gods about them, and consequently any future rewards and punishments, yet have left us the most graphic descriptions of remorse, as, for instance, Lucretius, lib. 3, v. 1024; and Mr. Hume describes remorse as one of the chief miseries common to all mankind. VII. I have often observed spurious remorse to be a concomitant of incipient insanity, and of mental and bodily decay. In *Bolton, sect. 1. Part xi. Sales, "Prelim. Dissert. to the Koran," sect. 8. many cases of this kind the patients have complained that all the sins they ever committed, of thought, word, disposition, and action, even from their infancy, seemed revived to their recollections, and tormented their minds with incessantly repeated accusations. In not a few of these cases, however, the absolute impossibility of their having committed some of the sins which they said distressed their conscience, was obvious to their friends. Such sufferers have compared their sensations to a fire smouldering in their vitals, and have by their own involuntary movements pointed out the stomach, heart, liver, and hypochondrium as the origin of their agonizing perceptions. In high states of this affection, the patient believes that the supposed self-reproaches of his own heart are the effect of divine agency; as did Job when he complained to God, "Thou writest bitter things against me, and makest me to possess the iniquities of my youth;"* and as did the Roman emperor Tiberius, who, in his celebrated letter to the senate, attributed his remorse "to gods and goddesses eating him." In other cases, the patient believes that Satan or that demons are the causes of his wretchedness, holds imaginary conversations with them, and, according, as it would seem, to the variations of the physical disorder, believes his infernal accusers to come or to go: for all morbid perceptions, or rather the perceptions suggested by morbid states of the body, have a tendency, in proportion to their intensity, to personify themselves to the consciousness; and the mental visions so created, may be even mistaken by the subjects of them for actual impressions on the several senses. VIII. Spurious remorse often greatly exercises its tyranny over persons of fanatical, weak, and only partially cultivated mind, and of feeble will; or whose judgment is not the invariable rule of their ideas and conduct. Sir William Temple says, "An ingenious physician told me, that in the fanatic times, he found most of his patients so disturbed by troubles of conscience, that he was forced to play the divine with them before he could begin the physician."+ Persons of this description, even during their comparative health, complain of "feeling as if they had done something dreadful," or, "as if something dreadful was going to happen to them;" are nearly always grieving and vexed about something or other, are easily offended, suspicious of being "slighted," and evince other indications of undue self-consciousness, or of inordinate attention to themselves. Their physical symptoms are frequently hysteria, palpitations of the heart, and hypochondriacal affections. The last reason to be assigned for the merely morbid and physical origin of spurious remorse, is, that the subjects of it, though "On Health and Long Life." Works. *Job xiii. 26. often conscious of its unreasonableness, rarely exert themselves in promoting their own relief. "I know," said one of the most amiable of these sufferers, the late poet James Montgomery, "that this is my own fault, and that I am an insane selftormentor." It is plain, however, that such a state of mind is not consistent with the natural effects and original intention of pain, which are to induce the patient to adopt, or to co-operate with, means for its mitigation. Neither do such states of mind yield to the intellectual consolations afforded by the Gospel, derived from its abundant representations of the infinite compassion of the Creator, and the perpetual and all-availing efficacy of the atonement as the medium of pardon for all confessed sin. Such sufferers, indeed, like the victims of morbid sentimentality, seem unwilling to part with their distresses. The writer, then, offers his conclusion from the foregoing reasons in the words of a well-known psychologist, that "religious enthusiasm and remorse, which often go hand in hand, are especially within the province of the physician."† The first practical inference from the foregoing observations would seem to be, that owing to the possible morbid influences of bodily states upon the mind, the attempt never can be otherwise than precarious for any man to form a moral estimate either of his own general character, or of the character of any of his particular actions. It was possibly for such reasons that St. Paul considered "man's judgment of him a very small thing, and avoided judging himself." It would seem equally difficult, for the same reasons, to form a correct judgment of a fellow-creature from the account given of him by himself. The majority of persons speak on all subjects beyond their immediate occupations, rather from their feelings than from a dispassioned judgment founded on facts. When, then, we are listening to a person's account of himself we are too probably listening only to an expression of his present feelings, and which are most likely more or less morbid, and certainly so in the case of every invalid. I am happy to find that the same inference has been formed by a writer of eminence, "On the Value of Feelings in Religion," in the following words-" And now from all that has been said, we can form no other conclusion than this,-that a man's feelings, or his state of mind, in any circumstances of his repentance and future religious life, possess no necessary and universal certainty. We might produce a number of passages from divines of high respect in confirmation of our opinions."§ Memoirs of, by Holland and Everett, vol. ii. Feuchtersleben's "Medical Psychology.' Sydenham Society, p. 136. 1 Cor. iv. 3. "John Joachim Spalding," translated by Evans, 1827, pp. 248, 249. 2. It seems needful to be on our guard against what I must call the histrionic simulation by morbid feelings, of what are supposed to be, whether rightly or wrongly, those emotions, states of mind, &c., peculiarly desirable and proper. Whenever the mind, and especially of persons of excitable temperament, has formed to itself the beau ideal of any such state as admirable in itself or as worthy of imitation in others, the process of self-transformation into that state, by the minds of such persons, is neither tedious nor difficult. "Let me," says a writer already quoted, "discover unto you a mystery; but it is of iniquity and horrible hypocrisy. I have known some (would you think it?) who have counterfeited trouble of conscience; and made show without all truth or true touch of sundry temptations and spiritual distempers incidental only to the saints, and have for that purpose addressed themselves with much industry and noise, and had recourse many times to some spiritual physicians, with many tears, a heavy countenance, and other rueful circumstances expressing almost exactly the scruples, doubts, distrusts, complaints of such as are truly grieved in spirit and true of heart. O the wonderful depth which lieth hid in the confluence of man's false heart! Such as these take upon them and lay aside terrors of conscience, as players do their apparel and parts."* I am emboldened by the foregoing statement to express my entire conviction that the "extraordinary," that is, emotional, piety of children and of very young persons, and especially their expressions of remorse, humility, &c., are of this imitative character and further, that it is too possible for persons of any age, of a peculiar temperament, and under especial physical and social circumstances, to maintain an artificial character-in plain words-to act a part, even on the bed of death. I do not charge such children and dying persons with deliberate or systematic hypocrisy in the worse sense of the term, but I resolve the phenomena exhibited by them into the fascination of their own ideas, the flattery of their circumstances, and the influence of disease combining with the all but infinite delusiveness of morbid religious feelings. A popular instance of this kind, though of a melancholy aspect, may, I think, be found in the account of Francis Spira, who, according to the narrative of his remorse, lay on his bed talking and descanting on his condition to the bystanders in the following language "I tell you there never was such a monster as I am: never was man alive a spectacle of such exceeding misery. I now feel God's heavy wrath, that burns like the torments of hell within me, and affects my soul with pangs unutterable. Verily desperation is hell itself. The gnawing worm of unquenchable fire, horror, confusion, and, Polton, p. 222. * |