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SERMON 20

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By Johnson, Samuel

Samuel Johnson: Sermons

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SERMON 201

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts.

II PETER iii.3

A very little acquaintance with human nature will inform us, that there are few men who can patiently bear the imputation of being in the wrong; and that there is no action, how unreasonable or wicked soever it be, which those, who are guilty of it, will not attempt to vindicate, though perhaps by such a defence as aggravates the crime.

It is indeed common for men to conceal their faults, and gratify their passions in secret, and especially, when they are first initiated in vice, to make use rather of artifice and dissimulation, than audaciousness and effrontery. But the arts of hypocrisy are, in time, exhausted, and some unhappy circumstance defeats those measures which they had laid for preventing a discovery. They are at length suspected, and by that curiosity which suspicion always excites, closely pursued, and openly detected. It is then too late to think of deceiving mankind by false appearances, nor does any thing remain, but to avow boldly what can be no longer denied. Impudence

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is called in to the assistance of immorality; and the censures, which cannot be escaped, must be openly defied. Wickedness is in itself timorous, and naturally skulks in coverts and in darkness, but grows furious by despair, and, when it can fly no farther, turns upon the pursuer.

Such is the state of a man abandoned to the indulgence of vicious inclinations. He justifies one crime by another; invents wicked principles to support wicked practices; endeavours rather to corrupt others, than own himself corrupted, and to avoid that shame which a confession of his crimes would bring upon him, calls “evil good, and good evil, puts darkness for light, and light for darkness.”2 He endeavours to trample upon those laws which he is known not to observe, to scoff at those truths, which, if admitted, have an evident tendency to convict his whole behaviour of folly and absurdity, and from having long neglected to obey God, rises at length into rebellion against him.

That no man ever became abandoned at once, is an old and common observation, which, like other assertions founded on experience, receives new confirmation by length of time. A man ventures upon wickedness, as upon waters3 with which he is unacquainted. He looks upon them with horrour, and shudders at the thought of quitting the shore, and committing his life to the inconstancy of the weather; but, by degrees, the scene grows familiar, his aversion abates, and is succeeded by curiosity. He launches out with fear and caution, always anxious and apprehensive, lest his vessel should be dashed against a rock, sucked-in by a quick-sand, or hurried by the currents beyond sight of shore. But his fears are daily lessening, and the deep becomes less formidable. In time he loses all sense of danger, ventures out with full security, and roves without inclination to return; ’till he is driven into the boundless ocean, tossed about by the tempests, and at last swallowed by the waves.

Most men have, or once had, an esteem and reverence for virtue, and a contempt and abhorrence of vice; of which,

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whether they were impressed by nature, implanted by education, or deduced and settled by reason, it is at present of very little importance to enquire. Such these notions are, however they were originally received, as reason cannot but adopt and strengthen, and every man will freely confess that reason ought to be the rule of his conduct. Whoever therefore recedes, in his practice, from rules of which he allows the obligation, and suffers his passions to prevail over his opinions, feels at first a secret reluctance, is conscious of some sort of violence done to his intellectual powers; and though he will not deny himself that pleasure which is present before him, or that single gratification of his passions, he determines, or thinks he determines, that he will yield to no future temptation, that he will hereafter reject all the sollicitation of his appetites, and live in such a manner as he should applaud in others, and as his own conscience should approve in himself.

Perhaps every man may recollect, that this was the temper of his mind, when he first permitted himself to deviate from the known paths of his duty, and that he never forsook them, in the early part of his life, without a design to return to them, and persevere in them; and that, when he was tempted another time, he complied, always with a tacit intention to add but this one more to his offences, and to spend the rest of his life in penitence and obedience. Perhaps there are very many among the most profligate, who frequently still their consciences, and animate their hopes, with views of a reformation to be sincerely entered upon in some distant period of their lives, who propose to dedicate, at least, their last years to piety, and at some moments give way to wishes, that they may some time taste the satisfaction of a good life, and “die the death of the righteous.”4

But these, however given up to their desires and passions, however ignorant of their own weakness, and presumptuously confident of their natural powers,5 have not yet arrived at the summit of impiety, ’till they have learned, not only to neglect,

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but to insult, religion, not only to be vicious, but to scoff at virtue.

This seems to be the last effect of a long continued habit of sin, the strongest evidence of a mind corrupted almost beyond hope of a recovery. Wickedness in this state seems to have extended its power from the passions to the understanding. Not only the desire of doing well is extinguished, but the discernment of good and evil obliterated and destroyed. Such is the infatuation produced by a long course of obstinate guilt.

Not only our speculations influence our practice, but our practice reciprocally influences our speculations. We not only do what we approve, but there is danger lest in time we come to approve what we do, though for no other reason but that we do it. A man is always desirous of being at peace with himself; and when he cannot reconcile his passions to his conscience, he will attempt to reconcile his conscience to his passions; he will find reason for doing what he is resolved to do, and, rather than not “walk after his own lusts,” will scoff at religion.6

These scoffers may be divided into two distinct classes, to be addressed in a very different manner. Those whom a constant prosecution of their lusts has deluded into a real disbelief of religion, or diverted from a serious examination of it; and those who are convinced of the truth of revelation, but affect to contemn and ridicule it from motives of interest or vanity.

I shall endeavour therefore to evince, First, the folly of scoffing at religion in those who doubt the truth of it. And,

Secondly, the wickedness of this practice in those who believe it.

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First, I shall endeavour to evince the folly of scoffing at religion in those who doubt the truth of it.7

Those who in reality disbelieve, or doubt of, religion, however negligent they may be in their enquiries after truth, generally profess the highest reverence for it, the sincerest desire to discover it, and the strongest resolutions to adhere to it. They will frequently assert, and with good reason, that every man is valuable in proportion to his love of truth; that man enjoys the power of reason for this great end, that he may distinguish truth from falsehood; that not to search for it is the most criminal laziness, and not to declare it, in opposition to the frowns of power, or the prejudices of ignorance, the most despicable cowardice.

When they declaim on this darling subject, they seldom fail to take the opportunity of throwing out keen invectives against bigotry; bigotry, that voluntary blindness, that slavish submission to the notions of others, which shackles the powers of the soul, and retards the progress of reason; that cloud which intercepts our views, and throws a shade over the light of truth.

Such is the discourse of these men; and who, that hears it, would not expect from them the most disinterested impartiality, the most unwearied assiduity,8 and the most candid and sober attention to any thing proposed as an argument upon a subject worthy of their study? Who would not imagine that they made it the grand business of their lives to carry the art of reasoning to its greatest height, to enlighten the understanding of the ignorant by plain instructions enforced with solid arguments, and to establish every important truth upon the most certain and unshaken principles?

There seems to be nothing more inconsistent with so philosophical

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a character than careless vivacity and airy levity. The talents which qualify a man for a disputant and a buffoon seem very different; and an unprejudiced person would be inclined to form contrary ideas of an argument and a jest.

Study has been hitherto thought necessary to knowledge, and study cannot well be successfully prosecuted without solitude and leisure. It might therefore be conceived that this exalted sect is above the low employments and empty amusements of vulgar minds; that they avoid every thing which may interrupt their meditations, or perplex their ideas; and that, therefore, whoever stands in need of their instructions must seek them in privacies and retirements, in deserts or in cells.

But these men have discovered, it seems, a more compendious way to knowledge. They decide the most momentous questions amidst the jollity of feasts, and the excesses of riot. They have found that an adversary is more easily silenced than confuted. They insult, instead of vanquishing, their antagonists, and decline the battle to hasten to the triumph.

It is an established maxim among them, that he who ridicules an opinion confutes it.9 For this reason they make no scruple of violating every rule of decency, and treating with the utmost contempt whatever is accounted venerable or sacred.

For this conduct they admire themselves, and go on applauding their own abilities, celebrating the victories they gain over their grave opponents, and loudly boasting their superiority to the advocates for religion.

As humility is a very necessary qualification for an examiner into religion, it may not be improper to depress the arrogance of these haughty champions, by shewing with how little justice they lay claim to victory, and how much less they deserve to be applauded than despised.

There are two circumstances which, either single or united, make any attainments estimable among men. The first is the usefulness of it to society. The other is the capacity or application necessary for acquiring it.

If we consider this art of scoffing with regard to either of these, we shall not find great reason to envy or admire it. It

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requires no depth of knowledge, or intenseness of thought. Contracted notions, and superficial views, are sufficient for a man who is ambitious only of being the author of a jest. That man may laugh who cannot reason; and he, that cannot comprehend a demonstration, may turn the terms to ridicule.1

This method of controversy is indeed the general refuge of those whose idleness or incapacity disable them from producing any thing solid or convincing. They, who are certain of being confuted and exposed in a sober dispute, imagine that by returning scurrility for reason, and by laughing most loudly, when they have least to say, they shall shelter their ignorance from detection, and supply with impudence what they want in knowledge.

Nor will the possessors of this boasted talent of ridicule appear more to deserve respect on account of their usefulness to mankind. These gay sallies of imagination, when confined to proper subjects, and restrained within the bounds of decency, are of no farther use to mankind than to divert, and can have no higher place in our esteem than any other art that terminates in mere amusement.

But when men treat serious matters ludicrously, when they study, not for truth, but for a jest, when they unite the most awful and most trifling ideas, only to tickle the imagination with the surprize of novelty, they no longer have the poor merit of diverting; they raise always either horrour or contempt, and hazard their highest interest, without even the low recompence of present applause.

That they hazard their highest interest can hardly be denied, when they determine, without the most scrupulous examination, those questions which relate to a future state; and none certainly are less likely to discuss these questions with the care which they require, than those who accustom themselves to continual levity.

The mind, long vitiated with trifles, and entertained with wild2 and unnatural combinations of ideas, becomes in a short

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time unable to support the fatigue of reasoning; it is disgusted with a long succession of solemn images, and retires from serious meditation, and tiresome labour, to gayer fancies, and less difficult employments.

Besides, he that has practised the art of silencing others with a jest, in time learns to satisfy himself in the same manner. It becomes unnecessary to the tranquillity of his own mind to confute an objection; it is sufficient for him if he can ridicule it.

Thus he soon grows indifferent to truth or falsehood, and almost incapable of discerning one from the other. He considers eternity itself as a subject for mirth, and is equally ludicrous upon all occasions.

What delusion, what bigotry, is equal to this! Men neglect to search after eternal happiness for fear of being interrupted in their mirth. If others have been misled, they have been misled by their reverence for great authorities, or by strong prejudices of education. Such errours may be extenuated, and perhaps excused. They have at least something plausible to plead, and their assertors act with some show of reason. But what can the most extensive charity alledge in favour of those men who, if they perish everlastingly, perish by their attachment to merriment, and their confidence in a jest?3

It is astonishing that any man can forbear enquiring seriously, whether there is a God; whether God is just; whether this life is the only state of existence; whether God has appointed rewards and punishments in a future state; whether he has given any laws for the regulation of our conduct here; whether he has given them by revelation; and whether the religion publickly taught carries any mark of divine appointment. These are questions which every reasonable being ought undoubtedly to consider with an attention suitable to their importance; and he, whom the consideration of eternal happiness

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or misery cannot awaken from his pleasing dreams, cannot prevail upon to suspend his mirth, surely ought not to despise others for dulness and stupidity.4

Let it be remembered, that the nature of things is not alterable by our conduct. We cannot make truth; it is our business only to find it. No proposition can become more or less certain or important, by being considered or neglected. It is to no purpose to wish, or to suppose, that to be false, which is in itself true, and therefore to acquiesce in our own wishes and suppositions, when the matter is of eternal consequence, to believe obstinately without grounds of belief, and to determine without examination, is the last degree of folly and absurdity. It is not impossible that he who acts in this manner may obtain the approbation of madmen like himself, but he will incur the contempt of every wise man; and, what is more to be feared, amidst his security and supineness, his sallies and his flights, “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh him to scorn; the Lord shall have him in derision.”5

Thus have I endeavoured to give a faint idea of the folly of those who scoff at religion, because they disbelieve, and, by scoffing, harden themselves in their disbelief. But I shall be yet more unable to describe, in a proper manner, what I am to mention in the second place,

The wickedness of those that believe religion, and yet deride it from motives of interest or vanity.6

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This is a degree of guilt against which it might seem, at the first view, superfluous to preach, because it might be thought impossible that it should ever be committed; as, in ancient states,7 no punishment was decreed for the murderer of his father,8 because it was imagined to be a crime not incident to human nature. But experience taught them, and teaches us, that wickedness may swell beyond imagination, and that there are no limits to the madness of impiety.

For a man to revile and insult that God whose power he allows, to ridicule that revelation of which he believes the authority divine, to dare the vengeance of Omnipotence, and cry, “am not I in sport!”9 is an infatuation incredible, a degree

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of madness without a name. Yet there are men who, by walking after their own lusts, and indulging their passions, have reached this stupendous height of wickedness. They have dared to teach falsehoods which they do not themselves believe, and to extinguish in others that conviction which they cannot suppress in themselves.

The motive of their proceeding is sometimes a desire of promoting their own pleasures, by procuring accomplices in vice. Man is so far formed for society, that even solitary wickedness quickly disgusts; and debauchery requires its combinations and confederacies, which, as intemperance diminishes their numbers, must be filled up with new proselytes.

Let those who practise this dreadful method of depraving the morals, and ensnaring the soul, consider what they are engaged in! Let them consider what they are promoting, and what means they are employing! Let them pause, and reflect a little, before they do an injury that can never be repaired, before they take away what cannot be restored; before they corrupt the heart of their companion by perverting his opinions, before they lead him into sin, and by destroying his reverence for religion, take away every motive to repentance, and all the means of reformation!

This is a degree of guilt, before which robbery, perjury, and murder, vanish into nothing. No mischief, of which the consequences terminate in our present state, bears any proportion to the crime of decoying our brother into the broad way of eternal misery, and stopping his ears against that holy voice that recalls him to salvation.

What must be the anguish of such a man, when he becomes sensible of his own crimes! How will he bear the thought of having promoted the damnation of multitudes by the propagation of known delusions! What lasting contrition, what severe repentance, must be necessary for such deep and such accumulated guilt! Surely if blood be required for blood, a soul shall be required for a soul.

There are others who deride religion for the sake of displaying their own imaginations, of following the fashion of a corrupt and licentious age, or gaining the friendship of the great, or the applause of the gay. How mean must that wretch be who can be overcome by such temptations as these! Yet there are men who sell that soul which God has formed for infinite

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felicity, defeat the great work of their redemption, and plunge into those pains which shall never end, lest they should lose the patronage of villains, and the praise of fools.

I suppose those, whom I am now speaking of, to be in themselves sufficiently convinced of the truth of the Scriptures, and may therefore, very properly, lay before them the threatnings denounced by God against their conduct.

It may be useful to them to reflect betimes on the danger of “fearing man rather than God”;1 to consider that it shall avail a man nothing, if he “gain the whole world, and lose his own soul”;2 and that whoever “shall be ashamed of his Saviour before men, of him will his Saviour be ashamed, before his Father which is in heaven.”3

That none of us may be in the number of those unhappy persons who thus scoff at the means of grace, and relinquish the hope of glory, may God, of his infinite mercy, grant, through the merits of that Saviour who hath brought life and immortality to light!4

Editorial Notes

1 In this vivid attack on scoffers and sceptics, who may conceivably range in intellectual prestige from college and coffee-house wits to such philosophers as Bolingbroke and Hume, Rousseau and Voltaire, SJ assumes a role in which Boswell views him when he refers to his subject’s “strong, clear, and animated enforcement of religion ...” which “will, I trust, prove an effectual antidote to that detestable sophistry which has been lately imported from France, under the false name of Philosophy ...” (Advertisement to the Second Edition, Life, I.11-12). With this sermon, compare Rambler 95 (Yale IV.143-148) and SJ’s list of eleven causes of scepticism (31 Oct 1784), of which these seem the most relevant: “8 Study not for truth but vanity” and “9 Sensuality and a vicious life” (Yale I.414). Compare also the sections on self-delusion in Rambler 28 (Yale III.151-157) and 31 (Yale III.173) (where men “weave their sophistry till their own reason is entangled, and repeat their positions till they are credited by themselves”), and W. J. Bate, Achievement of Samuel Johnson (1955), pp. 99-100.

2 Isaiah v.20.

3 Here SJ extends a favourite image to the length of a whole par. For the “ocean of life” image, see Sermon 8, p. 87 and n. 6.

4 Numbers xxiii. 10.

5 “Hume, and other sceptical innovators, are vain men, and will gratify themselves at any expence. Truth will not afford sufficient food to their vanity; so they have betaken themselves to errour” (Life, I.444).

6 In this sermon SJ seems to regard the conscience as absolute. Elsewhere he appears to be less sure of it as a guide. See, e.g., Life, II.242 f. It is doubtful whether he ever regarded it as a universal, a uniform entity for all men. Many of his statements in the Life indicate that he felt the need for principles and laws as means of channelling human actions. “We can have no dependance upon that instinctive, that constitutional goodness which is not founded upon principle” (Life, I.443). Elsewhere he makes a distinction between the individual or private conscience and the social or public conscience; and in Life, II.249 f., he draws a distinction between perfect and imperfect obligations. He does not draw such a distinction in this sermon. See Voitle, pp. 151-57.

7 The distinction made between the folly of the genuine atheist and the wickedness of the sophisticated but believing scoffer recalls the passage in Life, III.10 f., where SJ contends that the ancient philosophers “disputed [on matters of religion] with good humour, because they were not in earnest as to religion.” But he adds, “Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it. ...”

8 SJ attacks Hume as intellectually unprepared to oppose Christianity: “Hume owned he had never read the New Testament with attention. Here then was a man, who had been at no pains to inquire into the truth of religion, and had continually turned his mind the other way” (Life, III.153).

9 Compare Shaftesbury’s famous and much disputed “test of ridicule” (Characteristics, ed. John M. Robertson, 1900, I.10).

1 On SJ’s own sedulous avoidance of the kind of ridicule he describes here, see Bate, Achievement of Samuel Johnson, p. 122.

2 SJ called Bolingbroke’s posthumously published works “wild and pernicious ravings” and attacked their author as a “scoundrel” and “a coward” (Life, I.268).

3 In Rambler 77 (Yale IV.43-44), SJ castigates with comparable heat those whose precepts had taught others to “scoff at truth” and who had “used the light imparted from heaven only to embellish folly, and shed lustre upon crimes.” See also Rambler 174 (Yale V.154-159), on the mischief of raillery. SJ would not tolerate scoffing at religious truth, or any kind of impiety: see Hawkins, p. 162 f., and Life, III.40 f., 189, and IV.295. On his own admission SJ had once been “a sort of lax talker against religion” until he went to Oxford, “where it would not be suffered” and where he took up Law’s Serious Call (Life, I.68).

4 Cf. Life, IV.288 f., where SJ notes that sceptical philosophers, though destined to oblivion, are now and again revived by “College joker[s],” who, albeit defenders of religion, do more harm than good by renewing interest in its attackers. For SJ, religion was so serious a matter that even facetious attacks upon its detractors are condemned.

5 “He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh them to scorn: the Lord shall have them in derision” (Psalms ii.4 in Prayer Book). “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision” (King James version).

6 Although neither Bolingbroke nor Rousseau fits precisely the kind of person SJ seems to be castigating here, it is worth suggesting, however tentatively, that he may have had them in mind. Both men made professions of faith but denied doctrines and practices that SJ regarded as essential. Bolingbroke professed faith in “the spirit of christianity,” in the “genuine christianity ... contained in the gospels,” which “requires ... our veneration, and ... strict conformity.” But he opposed traditional Christianity, with its doctrines decreed by councils, as the word of men. See Works (1754), IV.629, 631 f. Compare SJ’s comment, quoted on p. 221, n. 2. Rousseau also professed faith in the essentials of religion, and Boswell regarded his Profession de Foi du Vicaire Savoyard as “the performance of a man full of sincere reverential submission to Divine Mystery, though beset with perplexing doubts” (Life, II.12 f.). But SJ considered him “one of the worst of men; a rascal, who ought to be hunted out of society” (Life, II.11).

7 The 1st and 2d eds. read “state,” the 3d and 4th “states.” “States” is more grammatical (it is the proper antecedent for “them” in the next sentence), and it makes better sense than the singular.

8 “It is something particular, that Romulus appointed no punishment for actual parricides, but called all murder parricide, looking upon this as abominable, and the other as impossible.” Plutarch adds that Romulus may have been right: no one was guilty of that crime for almost 600 years. Lives, tr. John Langhorne and William Langhorne (1770), I.77 (“Romulus”). Cf. Rambler 148: “It was for a long time imagined by the Romans, that no son could be the murderer of his father, and they had therefore no punishment appropriated to parricide” (Yale V.23). The entire par. of this essay on domestic discord is close to this par. of the sermon.

9 Proverbs xxvi.19. See Sermon 17, p. 189. SJ, under the pseudonym of Pamphilus, severely criticized the famous distich on Gay’s monument in Westminster Abbey, beginning “Life is a jest”: “Mankind, with regard to their notions of futurity, are divided into two parties: A very small one, that believes, or pretends to believe, that the present is the only state of existence; and another which acknowledges, that in some life to come, men will meet rewards or punishments according to their behaviour in this world. “In one of the classes our poet must be ranked: If he properly belonged to the first, he might indeed think life a jest, and might live as if he thought so; but I must leave it to acuter reasoners to explain how he could in that case know it after death, being for my part inclined to believe that knowledge ceases with existence. “If he was of the latter opinion, he must think life more than a jest, unless he thought eternity a jest too; and if these were his sentiments, he is by this time most certainly undeceived. These lines, therefore, are impious in the mouth of a Christian, and nonsense in that of an atheist” (Gentleman’s Magazine, VIII, Oct 1738, 537). For a summary of the scholarship that attributes this piece to SJ, see Yale X.6.

1 See Acts v.29: “We ought to obey God rather than men.”

2 Matthew xvi.26.

3 A paraphrase of Mark viii.38 or Luke ix.26.

4 II Timothy i.10.

Transcription

Document Details

Document TitleSERMON 20

AuthorJohnson, Samuel

Creation DateN/A

Publ. Date1789

Alt. TitleN/A

Contrib. AuthorN/A

ClassificationSubject: Peter; Subject: Wickedness; Subject: Religion; Subject: God; Genre: Sermon

PrinterN/A

PublisherT. Cadell

Publ. PlaceLondon

VolumeSamuel Johnson: Sermons

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