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[Rye]

Eat Plague and Fire. Among any of these grand phenomena he is altogether
out of scale. He is a fly in a thunderstorm. His religious life and
thought are an amazing complication. He can lament the decay of piety
with the most sanctimonious. He remembers God continually, and thanks
and praises Him for each benefit as it comes, with evident honesty and
refreshing gratitude. He signs and seals his last will and testament,
"which is to my mind, and I hope to the liking of God Almighty." But in
all this there is a curious consciousness, as of one playing to a
gallery of unseen witnesses, human or celestial. On a fast-day evening
he sings in the garden "till my wife put me in mind of its being a
fast-day; and so I was sorry for it, and stopped, and home to cards." He
does not indeed appear to regard religion as a matter merely for
sickness and deathbeds. When he hears that the Prince, when in
apprehension of death, is troubled, but when told that he will recover,
is merry and swears and laughs and curses like a man in health, he is
shocked. Pepys' religion is the same in prosperous and adverse hours, a
thing constantly in remembrance, and whose demands a gentleman can
easily satisfy. But his conscience is of that sort which requires an
audience, visible or invisible. He hates dissimulation in other people,
but he himself is acting all the time. "But, good God! what an age is
this, and what a world is this! that a man cannot live without playing
the knave and dissimulation." Thus his religion gave him no escape from
the world. He was a man wholly governed by self-interest and the verdict
of society, and his religion was simply the celestial version of these
motives. He has conscience enough to restrain him from damaging
excesses, and to keep him within the limits of the petty vices and
paying virtues of a comfortable man--a conscience which is a cross
between cowardice and prudence. We are constantly asking why he
restrained himself so much as he did. It seems as if it would have been
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