a grateful return of services for some early benefit received; and an inquiry into such circumstances, as it might extend to many of the most delicate and confidential transactions of a long life, would, as inquisitorial, be productive of more evil, than it could be productive of good, as judicial. Gratitude, therefore, is left, and wisely left, to the free moral sentiments of mankind: justice is enforced by the united power of the state.

On this very simple distinction of duties which the law enforces, and of those which, for obvious reasons, it does not attempt to enforce, and on this alone, as I conceive, is founded the divis ion of perfect and imperfect rights, which is so favourite a division with writers in jurisprudence, and with those ethical writers whose systems, from the prevailing studies and habits of the time, were in a great measure, vitiated by the technicalities of law. The very use of these terms, however, has unfortunately led to the belief, that in the rights themselves, as moral rights, there is a greater or less degree of perfection or moral incumbency, when it is evident, that morally, there is no such distinction,-or, I may say, even that if there were any such distinction, the rights which are legally perfect, would be often of less powerful moral force, than rights which are legally said to be imperfect. There is no one, I conceive, who would not feel more remorse, a deeper sense of moral impropriety,-in having suffered his benefactor, to whom he owed all his affluence, to perish in a prison for some petty debt, than if he had failed in the exact performance of some trifling conditions of a contract, in the terms, which he knew well that the law would hold to be definite and of perfect obligation.

--

It is highly important, therefore, for your clear views in ethics, that you should see distinctly the nature of this difference, to which you must meet with innumerable allusions, and allusions that involve an obscurity, which could not have been felt, but for the unfortunate ambiguity of the phrases, employed to distinguish rights that are easily determinable by law, and, therefore, enforced by it, from rights which are founded on circumstances less easily determinable, and, therefore, not attempted to be enforced by legal authority.

It is, as I have said, on the one simple feeling of moral approveableness, that every duty, and therefore, every right is founded. All rights are morally perfect, because whenever

there is a moral duty to another living being, there is a moral right in that other; and where there is no duty, there is no right. There is as little an imperfect right in any moral sense, as there is in logic an imperfect truth or falsehood.

Actions of which the right is clearly determinable in all its circumstances, or may be imagined at least to be clearly determinable, the law takes under its cognizance. But into the greater number of our virtues or vices, it makes no judicial inquiry. And though it might seem, on first reflection, to be more advantageous, if all which is morally due to us, might have been judicially claimed, it is well that so many virtues are left at our own disposal. But for this freedom from legal compulsion, there could be no virtue,—at least no virtue which could to others be a source of delight, however gratifying the conscious disinterestedness might be to the breast of the individual. What pleasure could we derive from the ready services of affection, if the failure of one of them would have subjected the delinquent to personal punishment, -if we could not distinguish, therefore, the kindness of the heart, from the selfish semblance of it which it was prudent to assume,and if the delightful society under the domestic roof, had thus been converted into a college of students of domestic law, calculating smiles and proportioning every tone of tenderness, to the strict requisitions of the statute-book.

432

LECTURE XCII.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY.

My last Lecture, Gentlemen, brought to a conclusion my remarks on the various moral relations, which connect every individual of mankind with every other individual,-some by ties of peculiar interest, but all by the obligation of benevolent virtues and of benevolent efforts, when it is in our power to free even a stranger from suffering, or to afford him any gratification which he could not have enjoyed but for us.

The ethical inquiries which have of late engaged us, may be considered, then, as developements of one great truth, which it is impossible for man to consider too often, that he does not enter life, to be an idle spectator of the magnificence of the universe, and of the living beings like himself that dwell with him on that globe, which is his temporary home,-but that he has duties to perform, as well as pleasures to enjoy, and pains to avoid,— that he has it in his power to relieve the sufferings of others, and to augment their happiness,-and that, having this power, he must be an object of approbation to himself, if he use it for those noble purposes, or of disapprobation to himself, if he neglect to use it, still more, if, instead of merely neglecting the happiness of others, he exert himself, intentionally, to lessen it, and add to the sufferings that exist in the world independently of him, the sufferings which it is in his power to inflict on others, and the more dreadful sufferings of remorse and despair, that must be felt by his own guilty heart.

I should now, in regular order, proceed to the consideration of that propriety of conduct with respect to the individual, which constitutes what has been termed our duty to ourselves. But, as

this inquiry involves chiefly the consideration of happiness, and as so much of human happiness has relation to our notions of the Divinity, and our prospects of immortal life, it seems to me better, upon the whole, to deviate, in a slight degree, from our regular plan, and to give our attention, first, to those great subjects, before entering on the inquiry which must have relation to them.

We have already considered man in various aspects, as a sensitive being, capable of being affected by the things around him, and deriving from them not pleasure, and pain, and sustenance merely, but the elements of his knowledge,-as an intellectual being, capable of discovering the relations of things, comparing, generalizing, forming systems of truth, and almost creating worlds of fiction, that arise with the semblance of truth at the mere will of his fancy,—and, lastly, as a moral agent, connected with other moral agents, by ties that are innumerable as the living objects to whom they relate. We have now to consider the more important relation, which, as a created and dependent but immortal being, he bears to that Supreme Being, who is the great source of all existence.

On this subject, that comprehends the sublimest of all the truths which man is permitted to attain, the benefit of Revelation may be considered to render every inquiry superfluous, which does not flow from it. But to those who are blessed with a clearer illumination, it cannot be uninteresting to trace the fainter lights, which in the darkness of so many gloomy ages, amid the oppression of tyranny in various forms, and of superstition more afflicting than tyranny itself,--could preserve, still dimly visible to man, that virtue which he was to love, and that Creator whom he was to adore. Nor can it be without profit, even to their better faith, to find all nature thus concurring as to its most important truths, with revelation itself; and every thing living and inanimate announcing that high and Holy One, of whose perfections they have been privileged with a more splendid manifestation.

We have to consider, then, not the tie which connects man with his parents only, and with that race of mortal ancestors, by whom a frail existence has been successively transmitted from those who lived for a few feeble years, to those who lived afterwards for a few feeble years, but that far nobler principle

of union, by which he is connected with Him who has existed forever, the Creator of the universe, and the preserver of that universe which he has created. The inquiry into the existence of the noblest of Beings,-into the existence of Him to whom we look as the source of every thing which we enjoy and admire, is itself surely the noblest of all the inquiries on which man can enter; and the feelings with which we enter on it, should be of a kind that is suitable to the contemplation of a nature so noble, even as possibly existing. "Si intramus templa compositi," says an el oquent Pagan writer, when beginning an inquiry into some of the mere works of God, "si ad sacrificium accessuri vultum submitti mus, si in omne argumentum modestiæ fingimur: quanto hoc magis facere debemus, cum de sideribus, de stellis, de deorum natura disputamus, nequid temere, nequid impudenter, aut ignorantes affirmemus, aut scientes mentiamur.”*

The universe exhibits indisputable marks of design, and is not self-existing, but the work of a designing mind. There exists, then, a great designing mind. Such is the first truth with respect to the indication of divinity in the universe, to which I would direct your attention.

If the world had been without any of its present adaptation of parts to parts, only a mass of matter, irregular in form and quiescent, -and if we could conceive ourselves, with all our faculties as vigorous as now, contemplating such an irregular and quiescent mass, without any thought of the order displayed in our own mental frame-I am far from contending that, in such circumstances, with nothing before us that could be considered as indicative of a particular design, we should have been led to the conception of a Creator. On the contrary, I conceive the abstract arguments which have been adduced to show, that it is impossible for matter to have existed from eternity,-by reasonings on what has been termed necessary existence, and the incompatibility of this necessary existence with the qualities of matter,-to be relics of the mere verbal logic of the schools, as little capable of producing convic tion, as any of the wildest and most absurd of the technical scholastic reasonings, on the properties, or supposed properties, of entity and non-entity. Eternal existence,-the existence of that

Senec. Natural. Quæst. Lib. VII. p. 840.