His land of Egypt covered with frogs, Pharaoh was urgent with Moses and Aaron to “intreat the Lord” for him, and with conciliatory proposals in favour of the children of Israel. The plague of the frogs abated accordingly, Pharaoh hardened his heart as soon as he saw that there was respite. So with the plague of flies that came in grievous swarms into the house of Pharaoh, and into his servants’ houses, and into all the land of Egypt, so that the land was corrupted by reason of the flies; again Pharaoh besought Hebrew intercession, and pledged himself to acts of clemency; and again no sooner was the plague removed, than Pharaoh hardened his heart at that time also, neither would he let the people go. Plague after plague ensued—the murrain of beasts, the plague of boils and blains, and the plague of hail and fire; and so grievous was the last—smiting all that was in the field, both man and beast, as well as every herb and tree—that Pharaoh once more importuned Moses and Aaron, confessing his sins, imploring forgiveness, and promising amendment. Once and again he was heard and answered. “And when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunders were ceased, he sinned yet more, and hardened his heart ... neither would he let the children of Israel go.” The plague of locusts, destroying all that the hail had left, made him call for the Hebrew brothers again in hottest haste,—entreating forgiveness “only this once,” and deliverance “from this death only.” But the mighty west wind that swept away the ravagers had no sooner ceased to blow, than the hardening process again set in, and the tyrant revelled as of yore in his accustomed tyranny. How many more plagues might have been added to the ten—decade upon decade—with the like result, each facile amendment merging in a more and more facile relapse, it is superfluous to guess.

We read in Homer, as versified by Pope, that—

So Boileau satirises the “intrepid” scoffer, who puts off believing in God until fever prostrates him; who is almost as quick as the lightning to lift up his hands to heaven when the lightning glares across it, but laughs at poor feeble humanity as soon as the atmosphere is cleared and the storm quite spent:

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu describes in one of her vivacious letters a stormy passage she has just made from Calais to Dover, and diverts herself not a little, as her ladyship’s manner is, at the distress of a fellow-passenger, in alternations of anxiety as to being lost herself and losing her smuggled head-dress. “She was an English lady that I had met at Calais, who desired me to let her go over with me in my cabin. She had brought a fine point-head, which she was contriving to conceal from the custom-house officers. When the wind grew high, and our little vessel cracked, she fell very heartily to her prayers, and thought wholly of her soul. When it seemed to abate, she returned to the worldly care of her head-dress;” and the alternative exclamations of the distracted creature are liberally specified by Lady Mary; who then adds: “This easy transition from her soul to her head-dress, and the alternate agonies that both gave her, made it hard to determine which she thought of greatest value.”

Lord Lytton, in one of his fictions, comments on the instinct, as he calls it, of that capricious and fluctuating conscience, belonging to weak minds, “which remains still and drooping and lifeless as a flag on a mast-head during the calm of prosperity, but flutters and flaps and tosses when the wind blows and the wave heaves.” And an example to the purpose is given in the case of a selfish uncle, whose orphan nephews are all but coldly discarded until his own son is in extremis. “Mr. Beaufort ... thought very acutely and remorsefully of the condition of the Mortons, during the danger of his own son. So far indeed from his anxiety for Arthur monopolising his care, it only sharpened his charity towards the orphans; for many a man becomes devout and good when he fancies he has an immediate interest in appeasing Providence.” Such a man, in such a case, becomes at any rate lavish of promises, which perhaps at the moment he even intends to keep. But how are promises of this kind usually kept? Much after the manner predicated of Bajazet, by Acomat, in the French tragedy; a vaguely worded intimation, but definite enough in its scope: only let the pressure that extorts the promise be withdrawn, and gone will be the value of the promise too:

Pope would consign such trifles light as air to the lunar sphere,

Why do these last make so slight an impression on by-standers? Mr. Whitehead says because it is not a living but a dying man that speaks; and a dying man who wants to live. “It is fear that cries out in agony, not penitence that prays.” Fielding, in his masterpiece, moralises on the truism that be men ever so much alarmed and frightened when apprehending themselves in danger of dying, yet no sooner are they cleared from this apprehension, than even the fears of it are erased from their minds. It is much later in the same story, that the “hero’s” avowed resolution, at a crisis in his fortunes, to sin no more, lest a worse thing happen unto him, is ridiculed by a cynical acquaintance, as the effect merely of low spirits, and confinement—with the quotation of “some witticisms about the devil when he was sick.” The epigram in question is a favourite allusion with novelists and moralists of all sorts and sizes. There is a border freebooter of Scott’s, who, having recovered from a severe illness, thanks to the medical skill of the Black Dwarf, greets his benefactor, on horseback, all in bandit array, as soon as convalescent. “So,” said the dwarf, “rapine and murder once more on horseback!” “On horseback?” said the bandit; “ay, ay, Elshie, your leech-craft has set me on the bonnie bay again.” “And all those promises of amendment which you made during your illness forgotten?” continued Elshender. “All clear away, with the water-saps and panada,” returned the unabashed convalescent. “Ye ken, Elshie, for they say ye are weel acquent wi’ the gentleman,

For it is not every vow taken in a panic, to become a monk if spared, that is kept as Luther’s was—“devil” though the anti-Lutherans of his day might account and call him. Young Martin saw one of his friends struck dead by his side, by a stroke of lightning, in 1505; and the sight moved him to utter on the instant a vow to St. Anne that he would become a monk if he were himself spared. “The danger passed over, but he did not seek to elude an engagement wrung from him in terror. He solicited no dispensation from his vow.” Brother Martin ipso facto approved himself no member of the fraternity of what Le Sage calls vous autres, messieurs les diables, in a passage that indirectly bears upon our theme, for it refers to the proverbial worthlessness of promises coming from that quarter: “Voilà de belles promesses, répliqua l’Ecolier; mais vous autres, messieurs les diables, on vous accuse de n’être pas fort réligieux à tenir ce que vous promettez.” The epigram runs, if not rhymes, as well in Latin as in English:

Referring to proverbs of this kind it is that Archbishop Trench says, that sometimes an adage, without changing its shape altogether, will yet on the lips of different nations be slightly modified—the modifications, slight as they often are, being not the less eminently characteristic. “Thus in English we say, The river past, and God forgotten, to express with how mournful a frequency He whose assistance was invoked, it may have been earnestly, in the moment of peril, is remembered no more, so soon as by His help the danger has been surmounted. The Spaniards have the proverb too; but it is with them: The river past, the saint forgotten: the saints being in Spain more prominent objects of invocation than God. And the Italian form of it sounds a still sadder depth of ingratitude: The peril passed, the saint mocked.” Men indulge in doubts of a Supreme Being, says La Bruyère, when they are lusty and strong; but with sickness comes belief, such as it is. “L’on doute de Dieu dans une pleine santé.... Quand on devient malade, et que l’hydropisie est formée ... l’on croit en Dieu.” Believes? As to that, the devils believe, and tremble. But how when the dropsy is relieved and the trembling fit over? Dr. Johnson once adverted in conversation with Seward and Boswell to the evil life he led until sickness wrought a reformation, which, in his case, had been lasting. Mr. Seward thereupon observed: “One should think that sickness, and the view of death, would make more men religious.” But Johnson replied to this: “Sir, they do not know how to go about it; they have not the first notion. A man who has never had religion before, no more grows religious when he is sick than a man who has never learnt figures can count when he has need of calculation.”[14] It is to be observed that the doctor claimed for himself a previous regard for religion in quite early life; for some years it had, to use his own phrase, “dropped out of his mind,” but “sickness brought it back,” and he hoped he had never lost it since.

It is an old, old story, that of the generation which tempted God in the desert, whose days He therefore consumed in vanity, and their years in trouble. When He slew them, then they sought Him; and they returned, and inquired early after God. But it was only to start aside again, like a broken bow.

says Crabbe,

There is a passage in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters that reads like a paraphrase and expansion of this: “Quand le médecin est auprès de mon lit, le confesseur me trouve à son avantage. Je sais bien empêcher la religion de m’affliger quand je me porte bien; mais je lui permets de me consoler quand je suis malade: lorsque je n’ai plus rien à espérer d’un côté, la religion se présente, et me gagne,” etc. Plutarch tells us of Tullus Hostilius, that he exulted in irreligious opinions while in health, but was frightened into superstition when taken ill. To this passage, one of Plutarch’s translators, Dr. Langhorne, appends a footnote, about none being so superstitious in distress as those who, in their prosperity, have laughed at religion; and cites as an instance the famous Canon Vossius, who was “no less remarkable for the greatness of his fears, than he was for the littleness of his faith.” Cowper would cite to the same purpose a more distinguished example:

Swift gives a satirical narrative of “what passed in London during the general consternation of all ranks and degrees of mankind” on account of the predicted destruction of the world by a comet, on a given day. Friday was the declared day; and during Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, public bewilderment and terror are described as extreme—the churches crowded, and thousands praying in the public streets. At length Friday came. But as the day wore on, popular fears began to abate, then lessened every hour; “at night they were almost extinct, till the total darkness that hitherto used to terrify, now comforted every freethinker and atheist. Great numbers went together to the taverns, bespoke suppers, and broke up whole hogsheads for joy. The subject of all wit and conversation was to ridicule the prophecy and rally each other. All the quality and gentry were perfectly ashamed, nay, some utterly disowned that they had manifested any signs of religion.

“But the next day, even the common people, as well as their betters, appeared in their usual state of indifference. They drank, they swore, they lied, they cheated, they quarrelled, they murdered. In short, the world went on in the old channel.”

To apply what Butler says of “saints” in his application of the word, as a cant term then of political significance:

That is a fine stroke of nature, in the Knight’s Tale (from Chaucer), where Dryden makes Arcite resolve, only when and not until moribund, to avow the wrong he has done to Palamon, and own his fear of repeating it should he recover:

to whom Arcite owns the faithless part he has played, and desires forgiveness, but at the same time makes this frank avowal:—

Mr. Tennyson pictures for us a similar instance in Sir Lancelot:

Treating of missions in Abyssinia in the sixteenth century, Gibbon relates how, in a moment of terror, the emperor promised to reconcile himself and his subjects to the Catholic faith. “But the vows,” adds the historian, “which pain had extorted, were forsworn on the return of health.” Swift again, in his history of England,—for the Dean of St. Patrick wrote one—tells how William Rufus fell dangerously sick at Gloucester, on his return from Scotland, and being moved by the fears of dying, began to discover great marks of repentance, with many promises of amendment and retribution. “But as it is the disposition of men who derive their vices from their complexions, that their passions usually beat strong and weak with their pulses, so it fared with this prince, who, upon recovery of his health, soon forgot the vows he had made in his sickness, relapsing with greater violence into the same irregularities,” etc.

Michael Germain—who, however, is allowed to have looked upon the religious observances of Rome with the eye of a French encyclopédiste—makes merry, as one of Mabillon’s Italian expedition (in 1685), at the expense of that indolent and hypochondriacal Pope (so Sir James Stephen calls him), Innocent XI. “If I should attempt,” writes this French Benedictine, “to give you an exact account of the health of his Holiness, I must begin with Ovid, ‘In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas.’ At ten he is sick, at fifteen well again, at eighteen eating as much as four men, at twenty-four dropsical.... The worst of it is, that they say he has given up all thoughts of creating new cardinals, forgetting in his restored health the scruples he felt when sick; like other great sinners;” like Louis XV., for instance, at the commencement of whose last illness Mr. Carlyle so vividly depicts the consternation of the infamous Du Barry, lest she should have to take flight, as her predecessors had been constrained to do when the Well-beloved (Bien-aimé) had been sick before. “Should the Most Christian King die, or even get seriously afraid of dying! For, alas! had not the fair, haughty Chateauroux to fly, with wet cheeks and flaming heart, from that fever scene at Metz, long since; driven forth by sour shavelings? She hardly returned, when fever and shavelings were both swept into the background. Pompadour, too, when Damiens wounded Royalty ‘slightly, under the fifth rib,’ ... had to pack, and be in readiness; yet did not go, the wound not proving poisoned.” His Most Christian Majesty was of no distant kin with that profligate viscount in Mr. Thackeray’s story, who used to recount misdeeds “with rueful remorse when he was ill, for the fear of death set him instantly repenting; and with shrieks of laughter when he was well, his lordship having a very great sense of humour.” Of the same kindred comes the same author’s Miss Crawley, as we see her ill with fright, in her lonely, loveless old age. When in health and good spirits, this venerable inhabitant of Vanity Fair, we are assured, had as free notions about religion and morals as Monsieur de Voltaire himself could desire; but “when illness overtook her, it was aggravated by the most dreadful terrors of death, and an utter cowardice took possession of the prostrate old sinner.” Nor be forgotten, as a scion of the same stock, that puffy, pursy, pusillanimous creature, Jos. Sedley, of whom we read that, in the course of his voyage home from Bengal, he disappeared in a panic during a two-days’ gale, and remained in his cot reading a religious tract left on board by a missionary’s wife; while, “for common reading he had brought a stock of novels and plays,” to which of course he would return with all the more zest and devotion when the perils of the gale were past.

Comparing the influence on the mind of danger of death, and of danger from a storm, or from some other external cause than sickness, Archbishop Whately ascribes to the storm a much larger virtue of “wholesome discipline” than to the deadly sickness. He says, “The well-known proverb, ‘The devil was sick,’ etc., shows how generally it has been observed that people, when they recover, forget the resolutions formed during sickness. One reason of the difference, and perhaps the chief, is, that it is so much easier to recall exactly the sensations felt when in perfect health and yet in imminent danger, and to act over again, as it were, in imagination, the whole scene, than to recall fully, when in health, the state of mind during some sickness, which itself so much affects the mind along with the body.”

And yet the effects defective of a storm are a commonplace with the satirists. Peter Pindar devotes a “poem” to the subject; and a greater poet—if the said Peter can be called poet at all—has a forcible stanza on the equinoxes, when the Parcæ cut short the further spinning