There may be statesmen as servile, to whom the people are nothing, and to whom every thing is dear, but liberty and virtue. These eager emulators of each other's baseness may sound for ever in the ears of him on whose vices their own power depends, that what he has willed must be right, because he has willed it; and priests still more base, from the very dignity of that station which they dishonour, not content with proclaiming that crimes are right, may add their consecrating voice, and proclaim that they are holy, because they are the deeds of a vicegerent of that Holiness which is supreme. But the flatteries which only sound in the ear, or play, perhaps, with feeble comfort around the surface of the heart, are unable to reach that deeper-seated sense of guilt which is within.

In subjecting, for the evident good of all, whole multitudes to the sway of a few, or of one, Nature then, as we have seen, has thrown over them a shelter, which power may, indeed, violate, but which it cannot violate with impunity; since, even when it is free from every other punishment, it is forced, however reluctantly, to become the punisher of itself. This shelter, under which alone human weakness is safe, and which does not give protection only, but happiness, is the shelter of virtue, the shelter of moral love and hate, of moral pity and indignation, of moral joy and remorse. Life, indeed, and many of the enjoyments which render social life delightful, may, at least on a great part of the surface of the earth, be at the mercy of a power that may seem to attack, or forbear, with no restraint but the caprice of its own will. Yet, before even these can be assailed, there is a voice which warns to desist, and a still more awful voice of condemnation, when the warning has been disregarded.

For our best enjoyments, our remembrances of virtue, and our wishes of virtue, we are not dependent on the mercy, nor even on the restraints of power. Nature has provided for them with all her care, by placing them where no force can reach. In freedom, or under tyranny, they alike are safe from aggression; because, wherever the arm can find its way, there is still conscience beyond The blow which reaches the heart itself, cannot tear from the heart what, in life, has been happiness or consolation, and what, in death, is a happiness that needs not to be comforted.

Our own felicity is then, truly, in no slight degree, as Goldsmith says, consigned to ourselves, amidst all the varieties of social institutions.

In every government, though terrors reign,
Though tyrant kings, or tyrant laws restrain,
How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves, in every place, consign'd,
Our own felicity we make or find.

With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,
Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.
The lifted axe, the agonizing wheel,
Luke's iron crown, and Damien's bed of steel,
To men remote from power but rarely known,
Leave reason, faith, and conscience all our own.1

"So far," says Cicero, "is virtue from depending on the enactment of kings, that it is as ancient as the system of nature itself, or as the great Being by whom nature was formed." "Vis ad recte facta vocandi et a peccatis avocandi, non modo senior est, quam aetas populorum et civitatum, sed aequalis illius coelum atque terras tuentis et regentis Dei :-Nec si, regnante Tarquinio, nulla erat Romae scripta lex de stupris, idcirco non contra illam legem sempiternam, Sextus 1 Concluding verses of "The Traveller."

Tarquinius vim Lucretiae attulit. Erat enim ratio profecta a rerum natura, et ad rectè faciendum impellens et a dilicto avocans, quae non tum denique incipit lex esse cum scripta est, sed tum cum orta est; orta autem simul est cum mente divina." The law, on which right and wrong depend, did not begin to be law when it was written: it is older than the ages of nations and cities, and contemporary with the very eternity of God.

LECTURE LXXVI.

Of the System of Mandeville.-Of the Influence of Reason on our Moral Sentiments.-Of the Systems of Clarke and Wollaston.

GENTLEMEN, in the inquiries which have last engaged us, we have seen what that susceptibility of moral emotion is, to which we owe our notions of virtue and vice, in all their relative variety of aspects: we have seen in what sense it is to be understood as an original principle of our common nature, and what limitations. it is necessary to give to its absolute universality. There is a sophistry, however, the errors of which it was necessary to state to you, that confounds, in these limitations, the primary distinctions themselves; and supposes that it has shown the whole system of morals to be founded on accidental prejudices, when, in opposition to the millions of millions of cases, that obviously confirm the truth of an original tendency to certain moral preferences, it has been able to exhibit a few facts which it professes to regard as anomalous. The fallacy of this objection I endeavoured, accordingly,

1 De Legibus, lib. ii. c. 4, of Gruter's notation, or c. 8, 9, 10, of the common notation, with some alterations and omissions.

to prove to you, by showing that the supposed anomalies arise, not from defect of original moral tendencies, but from the operation of other principles which are essential parts of our mental constitution, like our susceptibility of moral emotion; which are not, however, more essential parts of it than that moral susceptibility itself, and which, even in modifying our sentiments of approbation and disapprobation, produce this effect, not by altering the principle which approves and disapproves, but the objects which we contemplate when these emotions arise. In the conclusion of my lecture, I examined the kindred sophistry of those political moralists, who, considering right and wrong as of human institution, in their denial of every primary distinction of morals, found a sort of artificial virtue on obedience to the civil power; forgetting that their very assertion of the duty of obedience, supposes a feeling of duty antecedent to the law itself; and that there are principles of equity, according to which even positive laws are judged, and, though approved in many cases, in many cases also condemned, by the moral voice within the breast, as inconsistent with that feeling of justice which is prior and paramount to the law itself.

In some measure akin to the theory of these political moralists, since it ascribes morality, in like manner, to human contrivance, is the system of Mandeville, who considers the general praise of virtue to be a mere artifice of political skill; and what the world consents to praise as virtue in the individual, to be a mere imposition on the part of the virtuous man. Human life, in short, according to him, is a constant intercourse of hypocrisy with hypocrisy; in which, by an involuntary self-denial, present enjoyment of some kind or other is sacrificed for the pleasure of that praise which

society, as cunning as the individual self-denier, is ready, indeed, to give, but gives only in return for sacrifices that are made to its advantage. His system, to describe it a little more fully, as stated in the inquiry into the origin of moral virtue, prefixed to his remarks on his own Fable of the Bees, is simply this, -that man, like all other animals, is naturally solicitous only of his personal gratification, without regard to the happiness or misery of others; that the great point, with the original lawgivers or tamers of these human animals, was to obtain from them the sacrifice of individual gratification, for the greater happiness of others; that this sacrifice, however, could not be expected from creatures that cared only for themselves, unless a full equivalent were offered for the enjoyment sacrificed; that as this, at least in the greater number of cases, could not be found in objects of sensual gratification, or in the means of obtaining sensual gratification which are given in exchange in common purchases, it was necessary to have recourse to some other appetite of man; that the natural appetite of man for praise readily presented itself, for this useful end, and that, by flattering him into the belief that he would be counted nobler for the sacrifices which he might make, he was led, accordingly, to purchase this praise by a fair barter of that, which, though he valued it much, and would not have parted with it but for some equivalent or greater gain, he still valued less than the praise which he was to acquire; that the moral virtues, therefore, to use his strong expression, are "the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride;" and that, when we think that we see virtue, we see only the indulgence of some frailty, or the expectation of some praise.

Such is the very licentious system, as to moral

VCL. III.

2 N