Upon Matters Both Faithful and Worldly

What a mess the world is in! There are times when I consider it apposite to retreat back into the bunker and lose myself in the private library I have accumulated over the last forty years. There among the moldy smells and dusty bookcovers I only the other day rediscovered a book purchased in a different era of my life.

What might this book tell me about the nature of humanity, of its self-governance, of its quest to understand the infinite? What can it tell us, from the ancient past, of our own day?

The book purports to be a journal of travels by a ship's surgeon of the eighteenth century. That he visited some fairly exotic lands can be adduced from the very first paragraph quoted below, as the literate of the strange, remote nation he visited had a very different orthography than any previously known. The other facts noted down, too, were strange to my way of thinking, and redolent of issues that still haunt our minds in 2008.

From the book (or facsimile of an old ship's log, as you will), the author launches in media res into a description of the inhabitants of an odd and probably now extinct place:

I shall say but little at present of their learning, which, for many ages, has flourished in all its branches among them: but their manner of writing is very peculiar, being neither from the left to the right, like the Europeans, nor from the right to the left, like the Arabians, nor from up to down, like the Chinese, but aslant, from one corner of the paper to the other, like ladies in England.

They bury their dead with their heads directly downward, because they hold an opinion, that in eleven thousand moons they are all to rise again; in which period the earth (which they conceive to be flat) will turn upside down, and by this means they shall, at their resurrection, be found ready standing on their feet. The learned among them confess the absurdity of this doctrine; but the practice still continues, in compliance to the vulgar.

In choosing persons for all employments, they have more regard to good morals than to great abilities; for, since government is necessary to mankind, they believe, that the common size of human understanding is fitted to some station or other; and that Providence never intended to make the management of public affairs a mystery to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime genius, of which there seldom are three born in an age: but they suppose truth, justice, temperance, and the like, to be in every man’s power; the practice of which virtues, assisted by experience and a good intention, would qualify any man for the service of his country, except where a course of study is required. But they thought the want of moral virtues was so far from being supplied by superior endowments of the mind, that employments could never be put into such dangerous hands as those of persons so qualified; and, at least, that the mistakes committed by ignorance, in a virtuous disposition, would never be of such fatal consequence to the public weal, as the practices of a man, whose inclinations led him to be corrupt, and who had great abilities to manage, to multiply, and defend his corruptions.

In like manner, the disbelief of a Divine Providence renders a man incapable of holding any public station; for, since kings avow themselves to be the deputies of Providence, the Lilliputians think nothing can be more absurd than for a prince to employ such men as disown the authority under which he acts.

In relating these and the following laws, I would only be understood to mean the original institutions, and not the most scandalous corruptions, into which these people are fallen by the degenerate nature of man.