dissenter was a nullity, and that the couple were, in the sight of
heaven, guilty of adultery. He defended the use of instrumental music in
public worship on the ground that the notes of the organ had a power to
counteract the influence of devils on the spinal marrow of human
beings. In his treatise on this subject, he remarked that there was
high authority for the opinion that the spinal marrow, when decomposed,
became a serpent. Whether this opinion were or were not correct, he
thought it unnecessary to decide. Perhaps, he said, the eminent men
in whose works it was found had meant only to express figuratively the
great truth, that the Old Serpent operates on us chiefly through the
spinal marrow, [474] Dodwell's speculations on the state of human beings
after death are, if possible, more extraordinary still. He tells us that
our souls are naturally mortal. Annihilation is the fate of the greater
part of mankind, of heathens, of Mahometans, of unchristened babes. The
gift of immortality is conveyed in the sacrament of baptism: but to the
efficacy of the sacrament it is absolutely necessary that the water be
poured and the words pronounced by a priest who has been ordained by a
bishop. In the natural course of things, therefore, all Presbyterians,
Independents, Baptists, and Quakers would, like the inferior animals,
cease to exist. But Dodwell was far too good a churchman to let
off dissenters so easily. He informs them that, as they have had an
opportunity of hearing the gospel preached, and might, but for their
own perverseness, have received episcopalian baptism, God will, by an
extraordinary act of power, bestow immortality on them in order that
they may be tormented for ever and ever, [475]

No man abhorred the growing latitudinarianism of those times more
than Dodwell. Yet no man had more reason to rejoice in it. For, in the
earlier part of the seventeenth century, a speculator who had dared to
affirm that the human soul is by its nature mortal, and does, in the
great majority of cases, actually die with the body, would have been
burned alive in Smithfield. Even in days which Dodwell could well
remember, such heretics as himself would have been thought fortunate if
they escaped with life, their backs flayed, their ears clipped, their
noses slit, their tongues bored through with red hot iron, and their
eyes knocked out with brickbats. With the nonjurors, however, the author
of this theory was still the great Mr. D