'
In Paradise Lost Moloch and Belial take opposite sides on this point:--
MOLOCH.
'What doubt we to incense
His utmost ire? which, to the height enraged,
Will either quite consume us, and reduce
To nothing this essential; happier far
Than miserable to have eternal being.'
Bk. ii. 1. 94.
BELIAL.
'Who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion?'
1. 146.
Cowper, at times at least, held with Moloch. He wrote to his friend
Newton:--'I feel--I will not tell you what--and yet I must--a wish that
I had never been, a wonder that I am, and an ardent but hopeless desire
not to be.' Southey's _Cowper_, vi. 130. See _ante_, p. 153, and
Boswell's _Hebrides_, Sept. 12.
[872] Johnson recorded in _Pr. and Med_. p. 202:--'At Ashbourne I hope
to talk seriously with Taylor.' Taylor published in 1787 _A Letter
to Samuel Johnson on the Subject of a Future State_. He writes that
'having heard that Johnson had said that he would prefer a state of
torment to that of annihilation, he told him that such a declaration,
coming from him, might be productive of evil consequences.
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