of legislation; qu'on nous laisse comme nous sommes. The constituents of this national life are

But this idea is more powerfully represented elsewhere. I need not apologise for introducing in this place a passage of no less truth than grandeur, which, by unfolding the system of instruments whose combined action nourishes and forms a true national life, likewise indicates how many are the objects which, in such measure as time and opportunities permit, a State may embrace within its view:

23. "We will venture to say how, in the mercy of God to man, this heart comes to a nation, and how its exercise or affection appears. It comes by priests, by lawgivers, by philosophers, by schools, by education, by the nurse's care, the mother's anxiety, the father's severe brow. It comes by letters, by science, by every art, by sculpture, painting, and poetry, by the song on war, on peace, on domestic virtue, on a beloved and magnanimous king; by the Iliad, by the Odyssey, by tragedy, by comedy. It comes by sympathy, by love, by the marriage union, by friendship, generosity, meekness, temperance; by every virtue and example of virtue. It comes by sentiments of chivalry, by romance, by music, by decorations, and magnificence of buildings; by the culture of the body, * Esprit des Loix, xix. 4—6.

by comfortable clothing, by fashions in dress, by luxury and commerce. It comes by the severity, the melancholy, and benignity of the countenance; by rules of politeness, ceremonies, formalities, solemnities. It comes by the rites attendant on law and religion; by the oath of office, by the venerable assembly, by the judge's procession and trumpet, by the disgrace and punishment of crimes; by public prayer, public fasts; by meditation, by the Bible, by the consecration of churches, by the sacred festival, by the cathedral's gloom and choir; by catechising, by confirmation, by the burial of the dead, by the observance of the sabbath, by the Sacraments, by the preaching of the Gospel, by faith in the atonement of the cross; by the patience and martyrdom of the Saints, by the sanctifying influences of the Holy Ghost. . . Whence the heart of a nation comes, we have, perhaps, sufficiently explained; and it must appear, to what most awful obligations are held those, from whom this heart takes its texture and shape; our king, our princes, our nobles, all who wear the badge of office or honour; all priests, judges, senators, pleaders, interpreters of law; all instructors of youth, all seminaries of education, all parents, all learned men, all professors of science and art, all teachers of manners. Upon them depend the fashions of a nation's heart; by them it is to be chastised, refined, and purified; by them is the State to lose the character and title of the beast of prey; by them are the iron scales to fall off, and a skin of youth, beauty, freshness, and polish, to

come upon it; by them it is to be made so tame and gentle, as that a child may lead it."*

24. There is, however, a lower theory of civil government, according to which its end is either simply negative, and lies in the avoidance of certain kinds of evil, namely of injury to property and persons; or, so far as it is positive, is conversant only with the modes, direct or indirect, of accumulating the means of material enjoyment. "Political power, then," says Locke, "I take to be a right of making laws with penalties of death, and consequently all less penalties, for the regulating and preserving of property, and of employing the force of the community in the execution of such laws, and in the defence of the commonwealth from foreign injury; and all this for the public good.† Even according to this restricted view, I contend that national religion is not only useful, but absolutely re

* I copy from a fragment (which is cited in a letter of Mr. Basil Montague's to the editor of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh, vol. i. p. 159) of a sermon delivered by Dr. Ramsden, in 1800, before the University of Cambridge. If there be no full record of this magnificent production, it does not speak well for the generation to which it was given.

✦ Locke on Civil Government, ii. i. § 3; ix. § 123, 124; and First Letter on Toleration. Warburton's Alliance, b. i. ch. iv.-" Whatever, therefore, refers to the body is in his (the magistrate's) jurisdiction; whatever to the soul, is not." Hoadly's Answer to the Representation of the Committee of the Lower House of Convocation, ch. ii. sect. xi. Mémoire en Faveur de la Liberté des Cultes, par A. Vinet: Paris, 1826. A theory somewhat similar is to be found in the Edinburgh Review, April, 1839, pp. 235, 236, 273, 276. Paley has avoided this rock, holding "that the jurisdiction of the magistrate is limited by no consideration but that of general utility."-Moral Phil., b. vi. ch. x. The prima mali lubes is, I suppose, to be found in the passage which I have cited from Locke.

quisite, in order to the full realisation of the purposes of government.

25. Indeed their attainment must, in strictness, at the very best, be partial: it follows that, as the means for ensuring them are at all events defective, we cannot properly dispense with any of them; and that a condition of society in which there are impediments which prevent any of them from being brought to bear, is an essentially vicious condition.

Now it is agreed on all hands to be the duty of the lawgiver to aim not merely at the punishment of criminals, but at the prevention of crime; and indeed that, in the regulation of penalties, he must take into his calculations the manner in which they will probably operate as examples. He may punish crime when it occurs; he may weaken the temptations to its commission by known and efficient provisions for its detection, and by the intelligibility and certainty of the law. But he thus acts only on the fears of man, and, indeed, upon his apprehensions in their grossest form, in which they most approximate to the brute creation, namely, as having reference to immediate consequences. Nor has he any power to act otherwise; indeed, he may be materially checked in the use even of these instruments by circumstances defying his control. There are morbid states of the public mind, in which sympathy with the criminal is not duly subordinated to abhorrence of the crime, and in which, accordingly, the lawgiver must either lower the scale of penalties beneath the amount necessary to deter men from offending; or

he must endanger the whole administration of criminal justice by placing or leaving it fundamentally out of harmony with the public sentiment.

26. In this dilemma, Religion offers him her aid. She points out that it is hers to act more powerfully even upon the apprehensions of men by denouncing against sin the terrors of eternal punishment. She adds, that there are other and nobler means of moving or controlling the human heart. Reward, which the temporal ruler can so rarely make available, she exhibits to the view of men in its most durable and majestic form. But she does much more than this, and operates more effectually within the pale of the Christian dispensation, through more legitimate principles of duty. It is her prerogative to penetrate into the deepest recesses of the heart, and, sitting at the very fountain of action, to alter and regulate its springs. She provides the human being with a new canon of right and wrong; and, by a subtle and potent influence, she assimilates his inward composition to the code she has delivered, with the Divine commission in her hand, and the promises of revelation as the unfailing support of her labours. Thus the man, whom she begins to govern, clings to the acts of duty for their own sake; they coincide with the bias of his renewed nature; and he will now undergo menaced pains for their sake under the same law of an inner impulse as would previously have led him to dare the penalties of statutes rather than forbear to gratify his appetites. And as his dispositions are thus brought into radical harmony