man himself, and was out of God. He had a sense of right and wrong; but he did not ground it on the Divine command. He had a faculty of love; but he would not take account of the continual beneficence of the Almighty, and he spent that faculty upon such inferior objects as he chose. He was susceptible of the sentiments of gratitude and admiration; but he would neither admire the most worthy, nor return thanks to the most bountiful. And all this because he regulated these principles by a reference to himself as supreme arbiter, instead of a reference to a rule out of himself. He had been ordained to walk as an infant by the hand of a nurse; and refusing that aid he could only fall. That which we are specially to observe is, it was not that he thought "I will repudiate the good and worship the evil;" it was not even that he thought, "I will abandon the good to follow the pleasurable ;" it was the form and criterion, not the matter of conduct, that he appeared to himself to change; the language of his action was, "I will do that which seemeth good to myself, instead of that which seemeth good to God;" or, "I will require of God that that which He enjoins upon my practice should submit and approve itself to my understanding."

16. Thus, therefore, in the midst of God's fair creation, was there planted, wherever there stood a man, a perpetually prolific principle of derangement; of separate, self-centred action, spent ineffectually upon objects that did not enter into the design of the universe, nor contribute, unless by opposition and revulsion, to

VOL. I.

E

the fulfilment of its appointed work. The consequences of this rebellion, had they been uncontrouled, must have been, as it would seem, the continual growth of that self-worship which was established at the fall, until at length every vestige of truth and love had been destroyed, and earth had fully reached to the riper wickedness of hell.

17. While, however, it pleased the mercy of God to design a provision for the redemption of mankind by His Son, to be accomplished when the fulness of time should have come; so He likewise ordained certain conditions of the human existence, which, as intermediate expedients, and instruments of a secondary discipline, should both check the progress of selfishness, so far, at least, as to prevent the disease from arriving at its crisis, by establishing a counteracting principle, and should likewise prepare men to recognise the higher truths taught in Divine revelation, and supply them with real though partial approximations to the true law of their being.

18. These were various in shape, but their pervading character was the same; it was that of a xowvwvía, a common life: a common life in the family, in the tribe, in the nation, and in each of the relations which each of these contain, was, apart from direct manifestations of the Divine will, the grand counteractor of the disorganising agency of the law of self-worship, and prevented it (as it seems) from realising all those extremes to which it naturally tended. Even to the brute creation was extended a softening influence by

means of this principle of intercommunity. But to mankind it was invaluable. The records of ancient history too plainly testify, that the ordinary and habitual relation of man to man, when independent of any form of positive affinity or fellowship, was one of hostility. The charities of life ranged within the limits which were thus described; the rights of hospitality might, indeed, create reciprocal obligations between individuals who were personally strange to one another; but they always had reference to community of race or of nation, or to some specific acts, as their basis; to one or other of those forms of common life, which I have designated.

19. What can be more instructive to this effect than the sense of neighbourship as it was understood by the Jews? Within a territorial and hereditary limit the law of brotherhood had been determinately prescribed; but beyond those confines by which the letter of the command was bounded, the principle of human fraternity seems to have met with no recognition, unless indeed at the periods when the Hebrews imitated the nations upon their borders in the gratification of a common lust for idolatry. When this vicious disposition had been effectually repressed by the terrible chastisement of the Captivity, there remained, as Scripture shows us, a proud and deep misanthropy, which too clearly proves that, in this region of the earth, at least, man, as such, knew nothing of duty or of love to man.

20. Again: among the most civilised of ancient

nations, the Greeks, it was shameful indeed to break treaties, but wherever there was peace between neighbouring states, it was founded on treaty, or rather truce, upon specific and voluntary compact, unless with partial and qualified exceptions in cases of colonial derivation or of a known common origin. When the specified term of friendship or of suspended enmity had expired, the parties resumed at once their natural attitude of belligerents.* And not the mere habit of war and of marauding prove the extinction of the general law of love; not the mere existence of piracy, but much more the fact, that it does not seem to have been deemed infamous; the uniform recognition of slavery

*Thucydides, in his history, supplies us with many examples of truces and of alliances among the various belligerents both before and during the Peloponnesian war. In these it is very remarkable that abstinence from hostilities during the whole term, and not merely a cessation, is usually specified. It is still more so, that there is no example among them of what we now term a peace: they are all either suspensions of hostilities for a definite period, or else offensive alliances for the purpose of carrying on a common war. The first vary from ten days (between the Athenians and Boeotians, v. 26) to an hundred years (between the Acarnanians and Amphilochians, iii. 114). The latter are in the eighth book (c. 18, 37, 58), between the Lacedæmonians and the Persians, with respect to the Athenian war. Athens too was a formidable neighbour to Persia, while Sparta had no habitual relations with it. Although, however, the attitude of war was thus regarded as being natural to states, there were certain ties of race still recognised, to which we have allusions on different occasions, both as among the Greeks at large, and as among the leading families of which the nation was composed. A part of the Amphictyonic oath ran thus: "I swear that I will never subvert any Amphictyonic city; I will never stop the courses of their water either in war or peace."-Mitford, vol. i. ch. iii. 5, 3. In proof of what I have said of war as the habitual and ordinary state of the reciprocal relations of the Greeks, I would quote the following words of Thucydides:—ἐδέξαντό τε ταῦτα οἱ ̓Αργείοι μᾶλλον, ὁρῶντες τόν τε τῶν Λακεδαιμονίων σφίσι πόλεμον ἐσόμενον (ἐπ' ἐξόδῳ γὰρ πρὸς αὐτοὺς αἱ σπονδαὶ ἦσαν) καὶ ἅμα ἐλπίσαντες τῆς Πελοποννήσου ἡγήσεσθαι ν. 28.

as a permanent institution not less legitimate than any other, and the formal view of the slave as an animate machine, ὄργανον ἔμψυχον;* the prevalence of the law of force, indicated, among other signs, by the relative depression of the female sex; human sacrifices, the devouring of human flesh, the indifference of public law to all private misery and misfortune: these and the like features of ancient society supply us too abundantly with the materials of proof that the sense of a general brotherhood was at an end for all practical purposes, even though it might charm (and there how rarely) the sensibilities of the theatre; that the bond of amity between man and man, as such simply, as creatures having common faculties and a common form, was absolutely broken. If, as compared with the inferior animals, he had more power of discerning the rights of his brother, so also he was better able to perceive or imagine rivalry of interest, to sustain more longsighted and deliberate enmity, to add fuel to the flames of his anger or desire. There was indeed a law that in various degrees bound father to son, Spartan to Spartan, Dorian to Dorian, even Greek to Greek; but there was no law that bound man to man, or nation to nation. And we find only the partial reconstructions of primitive obligation, in the several divinely ordained forms of a common life, constituted by the union of men into bodies. Such then was the general law and office of human association. 21. And this law of mutual association was itself

* Arist. Pol.