What, then, is that theory of the moral indifference of actions which is evidently so powerless, of which even he, who professes to regard it as sound philosophy, feels the impotence as much as other men; when he loves the virtuous and hates the guilty, when he looks back with pleasure on some generous action, or with shame and horror on actions of a different kind, which his own sound philosophy would teach him to be, in every thing that relates to his own internal feelings, exclusively of the errors and prejudices of education, equal and indifferent? It is vain to say, as if to weaken the force of this argument, that the same self-approving complacency, and the same remorse, are felt for actions which are absolutely insignificant in themselves, for regular observance or neglect of the most frivolous rites of superstition. There can be no question that self-complacency and remorse are felt in such cases. But it surely requires little philosophy to perceive, that, though a mere ceremony of devotion may be truly insignificant in itself, it is far from insignificant when considered as the command of him to whose goodness we owe every thing which we value as great, and to disobey whose command, therefore, whatever the command may be, never can be a slight offence. To consider the ceremonial rite alone, without regard to him who is believed to have enjoined it, is an error as gross as it would be to read the statutes of some great people, and paying no attention to the legislative power which enacted them; to laugh, perhaps, at the folly of those who thought it necessary to conform their conduct to a law, which was nothing but a series of alphabetic characters on a scrap of paper or parchment, that in a single moment could be torn to pieces or burnt.

Why do we smile on reading, in the list of the

works of the hero of a celebrated philosophic romance, that one of these was "a complete digest of the law of nature, with a review of those laws' that are obsolete or repealed, and of those that are ready to be renewed, and put in force?" We feel that the laws of nature are laws which no lapse of ages can render obsolete, because they are every moment operating in every heart; and which, for the same reason, never can be repealed, till man shall have ceased to be man.

After these remarks on the general theory of the original moral indifference of actions, which considers all morality as adventitious without any original tendencies in the mind that could of themselves lead it to approve or disapprove, it may be necessary still to take some notice of that peculiar modification of the theory, which denies all original obligation of justice, but asserts the authority of political enactment, not as attaching merely rewards to certain actions, and punishments to certain other actions, but as producing the very notions of just and unjust, with all the kindred notions involved in them, and consequently a right, which it would be immorality as well as imprudence to attempt to violate.

Of this doctrine, which is to be traced in some writers. of antiquity, but which is better known as the doctrine of Hobbes, who stated it with all the force which his acuteness could give it,-a doctrine to which he was led in some measure perhaps by a horror of the civil dissensions of the period in which he wrote, and by a wish to lessen the inquisitorial and domineering influence of the priesthood of that fanatical age, by rendering even religion itself subject to the decision of the civil power;-the confutation is surely sufficiently obvious. A law, if there be no moral obliga

tion, independent of the law, and prior to it, is only the expression of the desire of a multitude, who have power to punish, that is to say, to inflict evil of some kind on those who resist them; it may be imprudent, therefore, to resist them; that is to say, imprudent to run the risk of that precise quantity of physical suffering which is threatened; but it can be nothing more. If there be no essential morality that is independent of law, an action does not acquire any new qualities by being the desire of one thousand persons rather than of one. There may be more danger, indeed, in disobeying one thousand than in disobeying one, but not more guilt. To use Dr Cudworth's argument, it must either be right to obey the law, and wrong to disobey it, or indifferent whether we obey it or not. If it be morally indifferent whether we obey it or not, the law, which may or may not be obeyed, with equal virtue, cannot be a source of virtue; and if it be right to obey it, the very supposition that it is right to obey it, implies a notion of right and wrong that is antecedent to the law, and gives it its moral efficacy. But, without reasoning so abstractly, are there, indeed, no differences of feeling in the breast of him who has violated a law, the essential equity of which he feels, and of him whom the accumulated and ever-increasing wrongs of a whole nation have driven to resist a force which, however long it may have been established, he feels to be usurpation and iniquity;— who, with the hope of giving freedom to millions has lifted against a tyrant, though armed with all the legal terrors, and therefore with all the morality and virtue of despotism, that sword, around which other swords are soon to gather, in hands as firm, and which, in the arm of him who lifts it, is almost like the standard of liberty herself? Why does the slave, who

is led to the field, in which he is to combat for his chains against those who would release him and avenge his wrongs, feel himself disgraced by obedience, when to obey implicitly, whatever the power may be which he obeys, is the very perfection of heroic virtue? and when he looks on the glorious rebel, as he comes forward with his fearless band, why is it that he looks, not with indignation, but with an awful respect; and that he feels his arm weaker in the fight, by the comparison of what he morally is, and of what those are whom he servilely opposes?

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"A sovereign," it has been truly said, may enact and rescind laws, but he cannot create or annihilate a single virtue." It might be amusing to consider, not one sovereign only, but all the sovereigns of the different nations of the earth, endeavouring by law to change a virtue into a vice,-a vice into a virtue. If an imperial enactment of a senate of kings were to declare, that it was in future to be a crime for a mother to love her child,-for a child to venerate his parent,-if high privileges were to be attached to the most ungrateful, and an act of gratitude to a benefactor declared to be a capital offence,-would the heart of man obey this impotent legislation? Would remorse and self-approbation vary with the command of man, or of any number of men? and would he who, notwithstanding these laws, had obstinately persisted in the illegality of loving his parent or his benefactor, tremble to meet his own conscience with the horror which the parricide feels? There is, indeed, a power by which "princes decree justice;" but it is a power above the mere voice of kings,-a power which has previously fixed in the breasts of those who receive the decree, a love of the very virtue which kings, even when kings are most virtuous, can only enforce. And

it is well for man, that the feeble authorities of this earth cannot change the sentiments of our hearts with the same facility as they can throw fetters on our hands. There would then, indeed, be no hope to the oppressed. The greater the oppression the stronger motive would there be to make obedience to oppression a virtue, and every species of guilt which the powerful might love to exercise, amiable in the eyes even of the miserable victims. All virtue, in such circumstances, would soon perish from the earth. A single tyrant would be sufficient to destroy, what all the tyrants that have ever disgraced this moral scene have been incapable of extinguishing, the remorse which was felt in the bosom of him who could order every thing but vice and virtue, and the scorn, and the sorrow, and the wrath of every noble heart, in the very contemplation of his guilty power.

Nature has not thrown us upon the world with such feeble principles as these. She has given us virtues of which no power can deprive us, and has fixed in the soul of him whom more than fifty nations obey, a restraint on his power, from which the servile obedience of all the nations of the globe could not absolve him. There may be flatterers to surround a tyrant's throne, with knees ever ready to bow on the very blood with which its steps are stained, and with voices ever ready to applaud the guilt that has been already perpetrated, and to praise, even with a sort of prophetic quickness of discernment, the cruelties in prospect which they only anticipate. There may be servile warriors, to whom it is indifferent whether they succour or oppress, whether they enslave or free, if they have only drowned in blood, with sufficient promptness, the thousands of human beings whom they have been commanded to sweep from the earth.