Among the associates who strove to bring the poet
back to the anchorage of fixed belief, and to wean him from the error of
his thoughts, Francis Hodgson was the most charitable, and therefore the
most judicious. That his cautions and exhortations were never stultified
by pedantry or excessive dogmatism, is apparent from the frank and
unguarded answers which they called forth. In several, which are
preserved, and some for the first time reproduced in the
recently-published Memoir, we are struck by the mixture of audacity and
superficial dogmatism, sometimes amounting to effrontery, that is apt to
characterize the negations of a youthful sceptic. In September, 1811,
Byron writes from Newstead:--"I will have nothing to do with your
immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity
of speculating upon another. Christ came to save men, but a good Pagan
will go to heaven, and a bad Nazarene to hell. I am no Platonist, I am
nothing at all; but I would sooner be a Paulician, Manichean, Spinozist,
Gentile, Pyrrhonian, Zoroastrian, than one of the seventy-two villainous
sects who are tearing each other to pieces for the love of the Lord and
hatred of each other.
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