f the existence of God? "Supposing even," he
says, "that man existed before God, even his higher pre-Adamite
supposititious creation must have had an origin and a creator, for a
creation is a more natural imagination than a fortuitous concourse of
atoms; all things remount to a fountain, though they may flow to an
ocean.

"If, according to some speculations, you could prove the world many
thousand years older than the Mosaic chronology, or if you could get rid
of Adam and Eve, and the apple, and serpent, still what is to be set up
in their stead? or how is the difficulty removed? Things must have had a
beginning, and what matters it when or how?"

If Byron did not question the existence of God, did he doubt the
spirituality and immortality of the soul? Here are some of his
answers:--

"What is poetry?" he asked himself in his memorandum, and he
replied--"The feeling of a former world and future." And further, in the
same memorandum:--

"Of the immortality of the soul, it appears to me that there can be
little doubt, if we attend to the action of the mind for a moment: it is
in perpetual activity. I used to doubt it, but reflection has taught me
better. The stoics Epictetus and Aurelius call the present state 'a soul
which draws a carcass'--a heavy chain, to be sure, but all chains, being
material, may be shaken off. How far our future life will be individual,
or, rather, how far it will at all resemble our present existence, is
another question; but that the mind is eternal, seems as probable as
that the body is not so. Of course, I here venture upon the question
without recurring to revelation, which, however, is at least as rational
a solution of it as any other. A material resurrection seems strange and
even absurd, except for purposes of punishment: and all punishment which
is to revenge, rather than correct, must be morally wrong: and when the
world is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures
answer? Human passions have probably disfigured the Divine doctrines
here; but the whole thing is inscrutable."

And again:--

"I have often been inclined to materialism in philosophy; but could
never bear its introduction into Christianity, which appears to me
essentially founded upon the soul. For this reason, Priestley's
'Christian Materialism' always struck me as deadly. Believe the
resurrection of the body, if you will, but not without a soul. The deuce
is in it, if after having had a soul (as