CHAPTER CXXXII.
DR. CADOGAN. A REMARKABLE CASE OF HEREDITARY LONGEVITY. REMARKS ON THE ORDINARY TERM OF HUMAN LIFE.
Live well, and then how soon so e'er thou die,
Thou art of age to claim eternity.
RANDOLPH.
Dr. Cadogan used to say that the life of man is properly ninety years instead of three-score and ten; thirty to go up, thirty to stand still, and thirty to go down.
Who told him so? said Dr. Dove; and who made him better informed upon that point than the Psalmist?
Any one who far exceeded the ordinary term, beyond which “our strength is but labour and sorrow,” was supposed by our philosopher, to have contracted an obstinate habit of longevity in some previous stage of existence. Centenaries he thought must have been ravens and tortoises; and Henry Jenkins, like Old Parr, could have been nothing in his preceding state, but a toad in a block of stone or in the heart of a tree.
Cardinal D'Armagnac, when on a visitation in the Cevennes, noticed a fine old man sitting upon the threshold of his own door and weeping; and as, like the Poet, he had
—not often seen
A healthy man, a man full-grown
Weep in the public roads, alone,
he went up to him, and asked wherefore he was weeping? The old man replied he wept because his father had just beaten him. The Cardinal who was amazed to hear that so old a man had a father still living, was curious enough to enquire what he had beaten him for: “because,” said the old man, “I past by my grandfather without paying my respects to him.” The Cardinal then entered the house that he might see this extraordinary family, and there indeed he saw both father and grandfather, the former still a hale though a very aged man; the latter unable to move because of his extreme age, but regarded by all about him with the greatest reverence.
That the habit in this instance, as in most others of the kind, should have been hereditary, was what the Doctor would have expected: good constitutions and ill habits of body are both so;—two things which seldom co-exist, but this obstinate longevity, as he called it, was proof both of the one and the other. A remarkable instance of hereditary longevity is noticed in the Statistical Account of Arklow. A woman who died at the age of an hundred and ten, speaking of her children said that her youngest boy was eighty; and that old boy was living several years afterwards, when the account was drawn up. The habit, however, he thought, was likely in such cases to correct itself, and become weaker in every generation. An ill habit he deemed it, because no circumstances can render extreme old age desirable: it cannot be so in a good man, for his own sake; nor in a bad one for the sake of every body connected with him. On all accounts the appointed term is best, and the wise and pious Mr. How has given us one cogent reason why it is so.
“The viciousness of mankind,” that excellent person says, “occasioned the flood; and very probably God thought fit to drown the world for these two reasons; first to punish the then living offenders; and next to prevent mens plunging into those prodigious depths of impiety, for all future ages. For if in the short term of life, which is now allotted to mankind, men are capable of being puffed up to such an insolent degree of pride and folly, as to forget God and their own mortality, his power and their own weakness; if a prosperity bounded by three-score and ten years, (and what mortal's prosperity, since the deluge, ever lasted so long?) can swell the mind of so frail a creature to such a prodigious size of vanity, what boundaries could be set to his arrogance, if his life and prosperity, like that of the Patriarch's were likely to continue eight or nine hundred years together? If under the existing circumstances of life, mens passions can rise so high; if the present short and uncertain enjoyments of the world, are able to occasion such an extravagant pride, such unmeasurable ambition, such sordid avarice, such barbarous rapine and injustice, such malice and envy, and so many other detestable things, which compose the numerous train of vice,—how then would the passions have flamed, and to what a monstrous stature would every vice have grown, if those enjoyments which provoked and increased them, were of eight or nine hundred years duration? If eternal happiness and eternal punishment are able to make no stronger impressions upon men's minds, so near at hand, it may well be imagined that at so great a distance, they would have made no impression at all; that eternal happiness would have been entirely divested of its allurements, and eternal misery of its terrors; and the Great Creator would have been deprived of that obedience and adoration, which are so justly due to him from his creatures. Thus, the inundation of vice has in some measure, by the goodness of God, been prevented by an inundation of water. That which was the punishment of one generation, may be said to have been the preservation of all those which have succeeded. For if life had not been thus clipped, one Tiberius, one Caligula, one Nero, one Louis XIV. had been sufficient to have destroyed the whole race of mankind; each of whose lives had they been ten times as long, and the mischiefs they occasioned multiplied by that number, it might easily be computed how great a plague one such long-lived monster would have been to the world.”
Reflect, reader upon this extract. The reasoning is neither fantastic, nor far-fetched; but it will probably be as new to you as it was to me, when I met with it in Mr. How's Devout Meditations. The republication of that book is one of those good works for which this country is beholden to the late excellent Bishop Jebb. Mr. Hetherington in his very original and able treatise upon the Fullness of Time, has seen this subject in the same point of view. He says “Even our three-score and ten years, broken and uncertain as that little span is, can delude us into the folly of putting death and its dread reckoning far from us, as if we were never to die, and might therefore neglect any preparation for the after judgement. But if we were to see before us the prospect of a life of one thousand years, we should doubtless regard death as a bug-bear indeed, and throw off all the salutary restraint which the fear of it now exercises. Suppose our tendencies to every kind of sinful indulgence as strong as at present, with the prospect of such lengthened enjoyment and immunity from danger, and we may easily imagine with what hundred-fold eagerness we should plunge into all kinds of enormity, and revel in the wildest licentiousness. But this is the very consummation to which the race of Adam had reached, when ‘God looked on the earth, and behold it was corrupt and filled with violence;’ and God determined to destroy the earth with its inhabitants.”
A remark of Brantome's may be quoted as the curious confirmation of a pious man's opinion by a thoroughly corrupt one. It occurs in his Discourse upon the Emperor Charles the fifth. “Il faut certes confesser,” he says, “comme j'ouy dire une fois à un vieux Capitaine Espagnol, que si ce grand Empereur eust été immortel, ou seulement de cent ans bien sain et dispos, il auroit esté par guerre le vray Fleau du Monde, tant il estoit frappé d'ambition, si jamais Empereur le fut.”
