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of this world, and as ready to uphold and defend the right. are times when our expectations on this subject are disappointed, and when we see acts of moral heroism only landing him who performs them in opprobrium and suffering. Still, even in such cases, our instincts keep firm, in spite of all appearances to the contrary; and we believe that, sooner or later, in this world or in the world to come, the deeds will meet with their appropriate reward.

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VII. Moral good lies in the region of the will. By this I mean that every truly virtuous act must be a voluntary one. In saying so, I do not mean to assert that every morally good act must be a volition contemplating or performing some outward deed. The will of man exists in other forms than in a resolution to act. Wherever there is choice, I hold that there is will. adopt any particular object presented, or prefer any one object to another, there is choice. There is also the exercise of choice, and therefore of will, in all cases in which we deliberately reject any object or proposal made to us. I hold then that there is choicenot only in volition, or resolution, or the final determination to act-there is choice in wish or in voluntary aversion. When we wish that our friends may prosper and be in health, that God's name may be hallowed, there is will. These wishes and volitions and rejections may unite themselves with any one of our feelings, and even with our intellectual exercises. Using sense, I say that it is the region, and the exclusive region, of moral good. It is in voluntary acts that the conscience discerns a moral quality, and it is upon such acts, and no others, that it pronounces its decisions. We shall see forthwith that the will, in all its proper acts, is free; and it is upon acts which we were free to perform, but from which also we were free to abstain, that all the judgments of conscience are declared.

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VIII. Moral Good is a quality of certain actions proceeding from Free Will. I have been urging that moral good is not a creation of the mind when contemplating actions or affections, but that it has an actual existence. But let us understand what is the precise nature of the reality. In order to express the reality, some are in the habit of saying that morality has an objective and not a mere subjective existence. But this language is not fitted to

bring out the full truth, and may leave an erroneous impression, as if moral excellence had an existence as a separate object, like a stone or a mountain. It has an existence, but merely as a quality of free acts of intelligent beings.

IX. The moral quality of action cannot be resolved into anything simpler. The mind discerns it at once, as the eye sees a surface, and the muscular sense feels pressure. If any man asks us, What is extension? we bid him exercise his bodily senses. If any mau asks us, What is virtue? I bid him exercise his conscience in looking at a good action. No attempt should be made to give a positive definition of virtue. Any proffered definition will either be erroneous, or it will be a mere identical proposition. If we say that virtue consists in happiness, or in utility, or in beneficial tendency, all such accounts are utterly defective, for they leave out the main elements, the obligation, the imperativeness of moral law, the desert, the approvableness, the rewardableness. If we introduce such phrases as the following, and say that virtue is binding, that it is right, good; we are, after all, only saying that virtue is virtue. All that can be done by moral science on this particular point is, to exhibit fully the distinctive features, so that the conscience may recognize them, to bring out the law or principle, and embody it in suitable expressions.

SECT. II.-ON SIN AND ERROR.

I have been arguing that our intellectual and moral intuitions are all necessary and universal. This doctrine, however, must not be so stated as to imply that it is impossible for man to fall into error, or for the conscience to come to a false decision, or for human beings to commit sin.

That men do, in fact, fall into error, is evident from this single circumstance, that scarcely two persons can be brought to accord in opinion, even on points of importance. In regard, indeed, to necessary truths, there are certain restrictions laid on the mind. No man who considers the subject can be made to believe that two straight lines will enclose a space. Still, even in regard to such truths, the mind has a capacity of ignorance and of error;

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it may refuse to consider them, or, mistaking their nature, it may make statements inconsistent with them without knowing it. Those who have gone through the demonstrations of Euclid are constrained to believe the truth of every proposition, but the truths have never so much as been presented to the minds of the great majority of mankind, and many persons might easily be persuaded that the angles of certain triangles are equal to less or to more than two right angles. But whatever the restrictions laid on our liability to error in necessary truth, there scem to be no limits to man's exposure to mistakes in other matters. There is boundless room for them in all conclusions which are dependent on experiential evidence, especially when the proof is of a cumulative character. In all such matters the mind may refuse to look at the probation, or it may take only what is favourable to one side, and may arrive at most erroneous and preposterous results. This liability to error is apt to appear in all affairs in which we are under the influence of pride or party spirit, or a biassed and prejudiced disposition; in short, wherever there is moral evil swaying the will, and leading it to look on evidence in a partial spirit. If I were immediately cognizant of the heart of a good man, and could see the springs that move him to benevolence and selfsacrifice, I should be constrained to approve of him; but I may be prepossessed against him, and I twist and torture facts till I bring myself to believe that he is doing all this from a deep designing selfishness. The topic does not come within my proper scope, but I cannot keep from giving it, as my decided conviction, that while ignorance may arise from the finite nature of our faculties, and from a limited means of knowledge, positive error does in every case proceed directly or indirectly from a corrupted will, leading us to pronounce a hasty judgment without evidence, or to seek partial evidence on the side to which our inclinations lean. A thoroughly pure and candid will would, in my opinion, preserve man, even with his present limited faculties, not indeed from ignorance on many points, but from all possibility of positive mistakes.

But the question may be asked, how is the existence of sin, and of wrong decisions of the conscience, consistent with the necessity which attaches to our moral convictions? The difficulty can easily

be removed so far as the existence of sin is concerned; for sin must ever proceed from the region of the will, which is free to do good, but also free to do evil. It may be necessary for the conscience to decide in a certain manner, but it is not necessary that the will should do what the conscience commands. And it is to the influence exercised by a disobedient will upon the conscience that I attribute all the errors in its decisions. In whatever way we may reconcile them, these two facts can each be established on abundant evidence: the one, that in the primitive exercises of conscience there is a conviction of necessity; the other, that the conscience is liable to manifold perversions. Care must be taken not to state the two so as to make the one appear to be inconsistent with the other; both can be so enunciated as to make all seeming contradiction vanish. As to the exact nature of the necessity of conviction, and the ground which it covers, this is to be determined, like its existence, by an observation of the conviction itself. If we look directly and fairly at moral excellence, the mind must declare it to be good. But then, first, the mind may refuse to look at it at all, and, secondly, it may not regard it in the right light. If we look upon the living and the true God in the proper aspect, we must acknowledge that we owe Him love and obedience; but then we may refuse to look upon Him, we may contrive to live without God, and God may not be in all our thoughts; or we may fashion to ourselves a Deity with a degraded nature, making him one altogether like unto ourselves, and then the proper awe and affection will no longer rise in our bosoms.

It is to be taken into account that, while our decisions upon the acts presented may be intuitively certain, yet that the acts are not intuitively presented, and may be very inaccurately presented. The conscience, it is to remembered, is a reflex faculty, judging of objects presented to it by the other powers, and the representation given it may be incorrect. The liability to deception and perversion is increased by the circumstance that the states of mind with which our voluntary acts are mixed up are of a very complicated character. There is room in this way for giving a wrong account of our actual state of mind at any given moment. I contribute a sum of money to relieve a person in distress; I may do

so from very mixed or doubtful motives; but I am naturally led by self-love to look on the motive as good, and then I cherish a feeling of self-approbation, in which I should by no means have been justified had I taken a searching view of the whole mental state. Again, I find a neighbour doing the very same act, and I am led by jealousy to attribute selfish motives to him, and I condemn him in a judgment which may be equally unwarranted. By such seductions as these the mind may become utterly perverted in the representations which it gives or receives, and in the consequent moral judgments which it pronounces. In the case of these perversions of the conscience, as in the case of the errors of the understanding (as we have previously seen), the evil is to be traced to the will refusing to give obedience to its proper law, and conjuring up a series of deceptions to excuse and defend itself. The intuition is after all there, but it is difficult in a mind perverted by a corrupt and prejudiced will to put it in a position to act aright. In order to do this it may be needful to have a divine law revealed, and this applied by a teaching and quickening Spirit from above.

We are already in the heart of the subject of Sin, a topic which academic moralists studiously avoid, but which must be carefully looked at by those who would give a correct account of our moral constitution. In referring to it here, I do not profess to be able to give an explanation of the origin of sin under the government of God, whose power is almighty, and who shows that He hates sin. This seems to be a mystery which human reason cannot clear up. The topic certainly does not fall within the scope of our present investigation. I have here simply to consider sin in its reference to our moral convictions.

I. The conscience declares that sin is a reality. It is a reality of the very same description as moral good. It is not a separate entity, like a plant or an animal, but it is a quality of certain voluntary acts. I lay down this position in opposition to those who would represent sin as a mere privation or a negation. I never can bring myself to believe that deceit and envy and malice and ungodliness and lust are merely the absence of certain qualities; they imply the presence of real qualities in the will of those who cherish the affections and commit the deeds.

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