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CHAPTER XI.

ASGILL'S THEORY.

Coelum, non animum, mutant qui trans mare
currunt Mortis.

My friend Mr. Keningale Cook, author of Purpose and Passion, in an essay recently published in Fraser's Magazine, has brought under public notice the curious theory of Asgill, who maintained that to die was both unnecessary and cowardly, and who contrived to live to about a century, if one account of him may be credited. That Asgill was all wrong is clear

came very near being right.

enough, but he

His vision was

clouded by a false conception of our destiny, and he took no account of the fact that the law of matter is perpetual change. We may

:

CHAPTER X.

THE SUN AND THE SEA.

Solem quis dicere falsum

Audeat ?- Virgil.

THE sun is the great origin of health . . . the sea is the great healer. The man who would live long should never shun the sunlight. Build your house wide-windowed and many-windowed, so as to catch plenty of it and have a nursery under glass for your children, where they may roll about in nudity, and absorb the life-giving sunshafts. I suppose that the finest physical example of manhood is an English non-political country gentleman in his prime. Well, he lives out of doors. In autumn and winter he hunts and shoots; in spring and summer

he looks after his parks and woodlands. All day long he is in the open air, getting vigour from the sun. So he grows like one of his ancestral oaks. It must not be supposed that such vigour is unattainable from the great solar source upon a cloudy or rainy day. The light is there, though retarded: no cloud that ever overspread the sky could intercept the solar influence.

In taking as an instance of high physical health the typical country gentleman who abstains from politics, I may be accused of ignoring my theory that ideas are life. It is not so. There are ideas beyond the limits of the House of Commons, the Stock Exchange, and the newspapers. The life of an English country-gentleman is singularly like the life of Homer's heroes . . . who indeed were simply a set of Greek country-gentlemen, obliged to unite and punish the people of Troy, a city of sea-robbers and Sybarites. They relucted for a long time, just in the

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predicate of substance that it is always varying; of spirit, that it knows no variation. What we regard as change in human character is merely its revelation through the changes of circumstance. The power that we call Shakespeare was as great when the poet was a baby—ay, and before—as when Hamlet was conceived; it is as great now, somewhere; it can be neither diminished nor increased. This is true of all possessors of the immortal Spirit. I will not say that all mankind are such.

Asgill, who was expelled for heresy from both the Irish and the English Houses of Commons, and who passed in the King's Bench the last thirty years of his life, had made up his mind not to die at all. Die when we will,' he writes, and be buried when we will, and lie in the grave as long as we will, we must all return from thence and stand again upon the earth before we can ascend into the heavens.-Hinc itur ad

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Astra. Now the assertion of Christ concerning himself was, that man by him may And this is that magnetick

live for ever.
which hath drawn the world after him.'

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'Now, if these words of his are words only, then was he an impostor, and his doctrine is false. But if this assertion of himself be true, that man by him may live for ever, then all our attempts beneath this are mean and cowardly, as counting ourselves unworthy of eternal life.'

Elsewhere he asks: What then is death? Why, 'tis a misfortune fallen upon man from the beginning, and from which he hath not yet 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.'

And he puts his faith in his own theory in language too strong for the year 1700. If, after this, I die like other men, I declare myself to die of no religion. And in this let

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