do not understand each other's language; even when they co-operate, they scarcely acknowledge each other as friends and allies; and though they may travel in company, they look on each other with a constant mutual suspicion.

That men did not become aware of conscience as a peculiar power of the mind, till they had long reasoned and meditated upon actions and rules; -that they did not at first separate it from all other faculties, mark it by a name, and clearly discern its place;-may well be supposed. For with how much labour and doubt, and effort and struggle, have all abstract thoughts, however clear, all foundations of general truths, however sure, been extricated by man from the complex mass of events and appearances which surround him. Tardily and gradually, no doubt, do the principles of moral truth emerge into view, even among the sagest and most virtuous of the heathen. But has not this been so with abstract truths of the plainest kinds? Even those portions of human knowledge to which we here turn men's eyes, as the very type and exemplar of evident and indisputable speculative truth ;-the properties, I mean, of space and of number;-were not these, too, brought into view, late and slowly and partially, among the most acute and luminous intellects of

the ancient world?—while, over the greater part of the earth, and during the greater portion of the earth's history, no clear apprehension at all of such doctrines has found place in men's minds. Yet who among us holds that therefore these doctrines are precarious? and who does not see that the faculties by which we apprehend the properties of space and number are not the less real, or the less trustworthy, because they require to be unfolded and expanded by exercise and by teaching. Even though men's moral judgments should involve principles as certain and as clear as those by means of which they compare the largeness of visible things;—even if there be, concerning right and wrong, a knowledge as distinct and independent as that which studious men have established concerning the straight and crooked forms of material objects ;-it need not surprise us that such knowledge did not manifest itself in a distinct and speculative shape, till men had made considerable progress in the speculative exercise of their intellectual powers. "Hardly," says the Wise man*, "do we guess aright at things that are upon earth, and with labour do we find the things that are before us: but the things that are

*Wisd. ix. 16.

in heaven who hath searched out?"-Hardly, we may add, do we separate general truths from particular aspects of things in the palpable and visible objects of sense; how much more difficult must it needs be, to discover those general truths which require a calm speculative view of the busy, complex, twilight world within!

Yet in truth, in order to see whether men can separate the conscience of right and wrong from other principles of action, we have only to turn our eyes to that very country, to that very time, already spoken of, when sagacious and enquiring men first discovered those abstract truths which concern the external world. In that highly-gifted people, the foremost of mankind in the achievements of human reason, all the perversions of practice and all the blindness of the heart were not able entirely to darken the clear intellect, when it applied itself to moral speculation. And their philosophers soon separated the ideas of moral good and evil actions from notions of arbitrary command and extraneous recompense. Would we see the proof of this? Let us turn to that imaginary Polity which the great moral teacher of that day put forth as a symbol of the relations of

*

* Plato.

the various faculties of man :—and we shall there find this truth most clearly and loudly expressed. "Let us proclaim" he says* " with the voice of a herald, that he who is most virtuous and righteous is therefore the most happy man; and that the wicked and unrighteous is the most wretched ;and that this is so, although their acts remain hidden from all eyes, both of men and gods." Whether or not we assent to all the reasoning by which this declaration is preceded, it cannot but be clear that he who thus promulgates such a conclusion, endeavours to teach us, that moral good and evil are, for their own sakes alone, and without reference to ulterior regards, to be sought and to be shunned.

If we again turn our eyes to the same city a few years later, moral wisdom has removed her school from the Grove to the Porch and we discern another sect of teacherst who insist still more earnestly upon the independent and peculiar nature of vice and virtue. These lofty and unbending moralists refused to confess that the pleasures and pains of the body, the prosperous or adverse aspect of fortune, have in them aught of good or evil: an extravagant and distorted view, this,

* Repub. lib. ix. p. 580.

The Stoics.

of man's condition, no doubt: but one which well shows us how broad and strong in their minds was the line which separates moral good from external advantages. We trust that we have access to a wisdom better and higher than this, and more consistent with the true purpose of God's creation. But if we are disposed to smile too scornfully at the paradoxes of this sect, we may recollect that one of the boldest of these-that which declares that wickedness is more contrary to our nature than pain or tortures or death;-has been adopted by one of the greatest moral teachers of our own church, and has been by him so explained, as to be made a fundamental principle of the obligations of christian men. And thus, even in the heathen world, men came more and more clearly to see, how far virtue soars above all forms of mere pleasure; and even from them we may learn, if we ever need the lesson, the supreme reverence due to the law written on the heart.

But once more, a few generations later, let us turn our eyes to the same city. We there see, standing in the midst of Mars' hill, one invested with richer endowments and higher authority than the loftiest preeminence in the accomplishments

* Butler, Sermons on Human Nature.