and
almost before the speed wakens them they are struggling hopelessly in
the whirlpool at the bottom of the fall. But, for Johnson, society had
no sleeping potion strong enough to overcome his ever-wakeful sense of
the issues of life. Underneath all the "gaiety" that Miss Burney liked
to record, there was one of the gravest of men, a man whose religion
had a strong "Day of Judgment" element in it, who believed as literally
as Bunyan in heaven {137} and hell as the alternative issues of life,
except that he allowed himself some Catholic latitude of hope as to
that third possibility which provides the most human of the three
divisions of Dante's great poem. Most people, even the most strictly
orthodox, would now say that Johnson's religion contained too much
consciousness of the Divine Judgment and too little of the Divine Love.
But at least the fear of God, which was to him a thing so real and
awful, had nothing in it of the attitude, so common in all ages and all
religions of the world, which attempts to delude or defeat or buy off
the hostility of a capricious despot by means of money, or magical
arts, or a well devised system of celestial alliances. In Johnson it
came simply from the sense of sin and issued in the desire to live
better. He was as ethically minded as any one in that moralizing
century: only that he added to ethics the faith in God and conviction
of sin which have a power on life unknown to mere moral philosophy. He
lived among good men, mainly, but men, for the most part, whose
intellectual attitude towards the Christian faith was one of
detachment, indifference, or conventional acquiescence. That could not
be his attitude. He was the last man in the world to be content with
anything nebulous. The active exercise of thinking {138} was to him a
pleasure in all matters, and in things important a duty as well. He
was certain not to avoid it in the most important question of all. He
might have been either Hume or Butler, either Wesley or Gibbon, but he
was certain not to be, what the average cultivated man in his day was,
a respectable but unenthusiastic and unconvinced conformer.
Conventional acquiescence is easy provided a man does not choose to
think or inquire; but, as Carlyle said, that would not do for Johnson:
he always zealously recommended and practised inquiry. The result was
what is well known. His mind settled definitely on the opposite side
to Hume and Gibbon: the Christian relig