fused over all, invariable, eternal, which calls to the fulfilment of duty and to abstinence from injustice, and which calls with that irresistible voice, which is felt in all its authority wherever it is heard. This law cannot be abolished or curtailed, nor affected in its sanctions by any law of man. A whole senate, a whole people, cannot dispense from its paramount obligation. It requires no commentator to render it distinctly intelligible, nor is it different at Rome, at Athens, now, and in the ages before and after, but in all ages and in all nations, it is and has been, and will be one and everlasting,-one as that God, its great author and promulgator, who is the common Sovereign of all mankind, is himself one. Man is truly man, as he yields to this Divine influence. He cannot resist it, but by flying as it were from his own bosom, and laying aside the general feelings of humanityby which very act, he must already have inflicted on himself the severest of punishments, even though he were to avoid whatever is usually accounted punishment. "Est quidem vera lex, recta ratio, naturæ congruens,-diffusa in omnes, constans, sempiterna; quæ vocet ad officium jubendo, vetando a fraude deterreat; quæ tamen neque probos frustra jubet aut vetat, nec improbos jubendo aut vetando movet. Huic legi, nec abrogari fas est, neque derogari ex hac aliquid licet, neque tota abrogari potest. Nec vero, aut per senatum aut per populum, solvi hac lege possumus. Neque est querendus explanator aut interpres ejus alius. Nec erit alia lex Romæ alia Athenis,-alia nunc, alia posthac; sed et omnes gentes, et omni tempore, una lex et sempiterna, et immortalis continebit; unusque erit communis quasi magister, et Imperator omnium, Deus,-Ille legis hujus inventor, disceptator, lator; cui qui non parebit, ipse se fugiet, ac naturam hominis aspernabitur; atque hoc ipso luet maximas pœnas, etiam si cætera supplicia quæ putantur effugerit."

I have already, in a former Lecture, alluded to the strength of the evidence, which is borne by the guilty to the truth of those distinctions which they have dared to disregard. If there be any one who has an interest in gathering every argument which even sophistry can suggest, to prove that virtue is nothing, and vice therefore nothing, and who will strive to yield himself readily to this consolatory persuasion, it is surely the criminal who trembles beneath a weight of memory which he cannot shake off. Yet even he who feels the power of virtue only in the torture which it inflicts, does still feel this power, and feels it with at least as strong conviction of its reality, as those to whom it is every moment diffusing pleasure, and who might be considered perhaps as not very rigid questioners of an illusion which they felt to be delightful. The spectral forms of superstition have, indeed, vanished; but there is one spectre which will continue to haunt the

mind, as long as the mind itself is capable of guilt, and has exerted this dreadful capacity,-the spectre of a guilty life, which does not haunt only the darkness of a few hours of night, but comes in fearful visitations, whenever the mind has no other object before it that can engage every thought, in the most splendid scenes, and in the brightest hours of day. What enchanter is there who can come to the relief of a sufferer of this class, and put the terrifying spectre to flight? We may say to the murderer, that in poisoning his friend, to succeed a little sooner to the estate, which he knew that his friendship had bequeathed to him, he had done a deed as meritorious in itself, as if he had saved the life of his friend at the risk of his own; and that all for which there was any reason to upbraid himself was, that he had suffered his benefactor to remain so many years in the possession of means of enjoyment, which a few grains of opium or arsenic might have transferred sooner to him. We may strive to make him laugh at the absurdity of the scene, when on the very bed of death, that hand which had often pressed his with kindness before, seemed to press again with delight the very hand which had mixed and presented the potion. But, though we may smileif we can smile-at such a scene as this, and point out the incongruity with as much ingenious pleasantry as if we were describing some ludicrous mistake, there will be no laughter on that face from which we strive to force a smile. He who felt the grasp of that hand will feel it still, and will shudder at our description; and shudder still more at the tone of jocular merriment with which we describe what is to him so dreadful.

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 importance 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 dis

obey 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, we 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 obligation, 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.

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?

"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 he 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. 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 forever 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