moral duty implies a moral right, and the moral right a moral duty. When I say that it is my duty to perform a certain action, I mean nothing more, than that if I do not perform it, I shall regard myself, and others will regard me, with moral disapprobation. When I say that any one has a moral right to my performance of a certain action, do I mean any thing more than was said by me, in the former case, or rather, do I not simply mean still, that if I do not perform the action, the feeling of moral disapprobation will arise in myself and others?

The laws, indeed, have made a distinction of our duties, enforcing the performance of some of them, and not enforcing the performance of others; but this partial interference of law, useful as it is in the highest degree to the happiness of the world, does not alter the nature of the duties themselves, which, as resulting from the moral nature of man, preceded every legal institution.

The facility of determining certain duties in all their circumstances, and the impossibility of determining others, which vary with circumstances that cannot be made the subjects of judicial inquiry, and into which, for the general tranquillity of a state, it would not be expedient to make a nice inquiry, even though they could be made subjects of it, have been, of course, the great reason for which certain duties only are enforced by law, and others left to the morality of individuals themselves. It is easy, at least in most cases, and in all cases comparatively easy, to ascertain the obligation to the duties ranked together under the name justice,-the duties of abstaining from positive injury of every sort, and of fulfilling precise conventional engagements. It would not be easy to ascertain, in like manner, what number of injuries, on the part of a benefactor, lessened and perhaps destroyed altogether, the obligation to a grateful return of services for some early benefit received; and an inquiry into such circumstances, as it might extend to many of the most delicate and confidential transactions of a long life, would, as inquisitorial, be productive of more evil, than it could be productive of good, as judicial. Gratitude, therefore, is left, and wisely left to the free moral sentiments of mankind: justice is enforced by the united power of

the state.

On this very simple distinction of duties which the law enforces, and of those which, for obvious reasons, it does not attempt to enforce, and on this alone, as I conceive, is founded the division of perfect and imperfect rights, which is so favourite a division with writers in jurisprudence, and with those ethical writers whose systems, from the prevailing studies and habits of the time, were, in a great measure, vitiated by the technicalities of law. The very use of these terms, however, has unfortunately led to the belief, that in the rights themselves, as moral rights, there is a greater or less degree of perfection or moral incumbency, when it is evident, that morally, there is no such distinction,-or, I may say, even that if there were any such distinction, the rights which are legally perfect, would be often of less powerful moral force, than rights which are legally said to be imperfect. There is no one, I conceive, who would not feel more remorse, a deeper sense of moral impropriety,-in having suffered his benefactor, to whom he owed all his affluence, to perish in a prison for some petty debt, than if he had failed in the exact performance of some trifling conditions of a contract, in the terms, which he knew well that the law would hold to be definite and of perfect obligation.

It is highly important, therefore, for your clear views in ethics, that you should see distinctly the nature of this difference, to which you must meet with innumerable allusions, and allusions that involve an obscurity, which could not have been felt, but for the unfortunate ambiguity of the phrases employed to distinguish rights that are easily determinable by law, and, therefore, enforced by it,-from rights which are founded on circumstances less easily determinable, and, therefore, not attempted to be enforced by legal authority.

It is, as I have said, on the one simple feeling of moral approveableness, that every duty, and therefore every right is founded. All rights are morally perfect, because, wherever there is a moral duty to another living being, there is a moral right in that other; and where there is no duty, there is no right. There is as little an imperfect right in any moral sense, as there is in logic an imperfect truth or falsehood.

Actions of which the right is clearly determinable in all its circumstances, or may be imagined at least to be clearly determinable, the law takes under its cognizance. But into the greater number of our virtues or vices, it makes no judicial inquiry. And though it might seem, on first reflection, to be more advantageous, if all which is morally due to us, might have been judicially claimed, it is well that so many virtues are left at our own disposal. But for this freedom from legal compulsion, there could be no virtue,—at least no virtue which could to others be a source of delight, however gratifying the conscious disinterestedness might be to the breast of the individual. What pleasure could we derive from the ready services of affection, if the failure of one of them would have subjected the delinquent to personal punishment,--if we could not distinguish, therefore, the kindness of the heart, from the selfish semblance of it which it was prudence to assume,—and if the delightful society under the domestic roof, had thus been converted into a college of students of domestic law, calculating smiles and proportioning every tone of tenderness, to the strict requisitions of the statute-book.

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LECTURE XCII.

ON THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY.

My last Lecture, gentlemen, brought to a conclusion my remarks on the various moral relations, which connect every individual of mankind with every other individual,--some by ties of peculiar interest, but all by the obligation of benevolent wishes and of benevolent efforts, when it is in our power to free even a stranger from suffering, or to afford him any gratification which he could not have enjoyed but for us.

The ethical inquiries which have of late engaged us, may be considered, then, as developements of one great truth, which it is impossible for man to consider too often, that he does not enter life, to be an idle spectator of the magnificence of the universe, and of the living beings like himself that

dwell with him on that globe, which is his temporary home,-but that he has duties to perform, as well as pleasures to enjoy, and pains to avoid,—that he has it in his power to relieve the sufferings of others, and to augment their happiness, and that having this power, he must be an object of approbation to himself, if he use it for those noble purposes, or of disapprobation to himself, if he neglect to use it,-still more, if instead of merely neglecting the happiness of others, he exert himself, intentionally to lessen it, and add to the sufferings that exist in the world independently of him, the sufferings which it is in his power to inflict on others, and the more dreadful sufferings of remorse and despair, that must be felt by his own guilty heart.

I should now, in regular order, proceed to the consideration of that propriety of conduct with respect to the individual which constitutes what has been termed our duty to ourselves. But, as this inquiry involves chiefly the consideration of happiness, and as so much of human happiness has relation to our notions of the Divinity, and our prospects of immortal life, it seems to me better upon the whole, to deviate, in a slight degree, from our regular plan, and to give our attention, first, to those great subjects, before entering on the inquiry which must have relation to them.

We have already considered man in various aspects, as a sensitive being, capable of being affected by the things around him, and deriving from them not pleasure, and pain, and sustenance merely, but the elements of his knowledge, as an intellectual being, capable of discovering the relations of things, comparing, generalizing, forming systems of truth, and almost creating worlds of fiction, that arise with the semblance of truth at the mere will of his fancy, --and, lastly, as a moral agent, connected with other moral agents, by ties that are innumerable as the living objects to whom they relate. We have now to consider the more important relation, which, as a created and dependent but immortal being, he bears to that Supreme Being, who is the great source of all existence.

On this subject that comprehends the sublimest of all the truths which man is permitted to attain, the benefit of Revelation may be conceived to render every inquiry superfluous, which does not flow from it. But to those who are blessed with a clearer illumination, it cannot be uninteresting to trace the fainter lights, which in the darkness of so many gloomy ages, amid the oppression of tyranny in various forms, and of superstition more afflicting than tyranny itself,-could preserve, still dimly visible to man, that virtue which he was to love, and that Creator whom he was to adore. Nor can it be without profit, even to their better faith, to find all nature thus concurring as to its most important truths, with revelation itself; and every thing living and inanimate announcing that high and Holy One, of whose perfections they have been privileged with a more splendid manifestation.

We have to consider, then, not the tie which connects man with his parents only, and with that race of mortal ancestors, by whom a frail existence has been successively transmitted from those who lived for a few feeble years, to those who lived afterwards for a few feeble years, but that far nobler principle of union, by which he is connected with Him who has existed for ever, the Creator of the universe, and the Preserver of that universe which he has created. The inquiry into the existence of the noblest of Beings,-into the existence of Him to whom we look as the source of every thing which we enjoy and admire, is itself surely the noblest of all the inqui ries on which man can enter; and the feelings, with which we enter on it,

should be of a kind that is suitable to the contemplation of a nature so noble, even as possibly existing. "Si intramus templa compositi," says an eloquent Pagan writer, when beginning an inquiry into some of the mere works of God, "si ad sacrificium accessuri vultum submittimus, si in omne argumentum modestiæ fingimur: quanto hoc magis facere debemus, cum de sideribus, de stellis, de deorum natura disputamus, ne quid temere, ne quid impudenter, aut ignorantes affirmemus, aut scientes mentiamur."*

The universe exhibits indisputable marks of design, and is, therefore, not self-existing, but the work of a designing mind. There exists, then, a great designing mind. Such is the first truth with respect to the indication of divinity in the universe, to which I would direct your attention.

If the world had been without any of its present adaptation of parts to parts, only a mass of matter, irregular in form and quiescent, and if we could conceive ourselves, with all our faculties as vigorous as now, contemplating such an irregular and quiescent mass, without any thought of the order displayed in our own mental frame-I am far from contending that, in such circumstances, with nothing before us that could be considered as indicative of a particular design, we should have been led to the conception of a Creator. On the contrary, I conceive, the abstract arguments which have been adduced to show, that it is impossible for matter to have existed from eternity, by reasonings on what has been termed necessary existence, and the incompatibility of this necessary existence with the qualities of matter,to be relics of the mere verbal logic of the schools, as little capable of producing conviction, as any of the wildest and most absurd of the technical scholastic reasonings, on the properties, or supposed properties, of entity and nonentity. Eternal existence, the existence of that which never had a beginning, must always be beyond our distinct comprehension, whatever the eternal object may be, material or mental, and as much beyond our comprehension, in the one case, as in the other, though it is impossible for us to doubt, that some being, material or mental, must have been eternal, if any thing exists.

"Had there e'er been nought, nought still had been;

Eternal these must be."t

In the circumstances supposed, however, it is very probable that if we formed any thought at all upon the subject, we should have conceived the rude quiescent mass to have been itself eternal, as, indeed, seems to have been the universal opinion of the ancient philosophers, with respect to the matter of the universe, even though they admitted the existence of divine beings, as authors of that beautiful regularity which we perceive. The mass alone would have been visible,-creation, as a fact unknown to our experience,and in the mass itself, nothing which could be regarded as exhibiting traces of an operating mind.

But though matter, as an unformed mass, existing without relation of parts, would not, I conceive, of itself have suggested the notion of a Creator,since in every hypothesis, something material or mental must have existed uncaused, and mere existence, therefore, is not necessarily a mark of previous causation, unless we take for granted an infinite series of causes, it is *Senec. Natural. Quæst. Lib. VII. p. 840 + Night Thoughts, Night Ninth.

very different when the mass of matter is considered as possessing proportions and obvious relations of parts to each other,-relations which do not exist merely in separate pairs, but many of which concur in one more general relation, and many of these again, in relations more general still. In short, when the whole universe seems to present to us, on whatever part of it we may look, exactly the same appearances as it would have presented, if its parts had been arranged intentionally, for the purpose of producing the results which are now perceived,-when these appearances of adaptation are not in a few objects out of many, but in every thing that meets our view, and innumerable, therefore, as the innumerable objects that constitute to us the universe,--we feel an absolute impossibility of supposing, that so many appearances of design exist without design, an impossibility against which, it may not be difficult to adduce words in the form of argument, but which it would be as difficult to endeavour not to feel, as to divest ourselves of that very capacity of reasoning, to which the negative argument must be addressed. It would be absurd, to attempt to state how many proportions may coexist, and yet be imagined by us, not to imply necessarily any design in the production of them. A few types, for example, may be thrown loosely together, and some of them may form a word. This we can believe without any suspicion of contrivance. If many such words, however, were to be thrown together, we should suspect contrivance, and would believe contrivance, with the most undoubting conviction, if a multitude of types were to be found thus forming one regular and continued poem. This instance, I may remark by the way, is one which is used by Cicero ; though it is one which we should little have expected to find in an ancient writer, in ages when the blessing of the art of printing was unknown. In speaking of the opinion of those who contend that the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, he says, "Hoc qui existimat fieri potuisse, non intelligo, cur non idem putet, si innumerabiles unius et viginti formæ literarum, vel aureæ vel qualeslibet, aliquo conjiciantur, posse ex his in terram excussis, annales Ennii ut deinceps legi possent effici; quod nescio, an ne in uno quidem versu, possit tantum valere fortuna."*

Such is our nature, then, that it would seem as truly impossible, that a number of types thrown together, should form the Iliad or Odyssey, as that they should form Homer himself. We might assert, indeed, that it was by chance, that each type had found its way into its proper place; but, in asserting this, our understanding would belie our sceptical assertion. A certain continued series of relations, is believed by us to imply contrivance, as truly as the sensations produced in us are conceived to imply the existence of corresponding sensible qualities, in the object without; or as any conclusion in reasoning itself, is felt to be virtually contained in the premises which evolve it. The great question is, whether, in the universe, there be any such con

tinued series of relations?

Strange as it may seem, that, by knowing more and more fully, all the uses which the different parts of the universe fulfil, we should be less disposed to think of the contrivance which those concurring uses indicate, the fact is certain. As often as we do think of them, indeed, in relation to their origin, and say within ourselves, is this admirable seeming arrangement fortuitous, or the work of design? we feel more profoundly, that there must have been contrivance, in proportion as we have discovered more traces of har* De Nat. Deorum, Lib. II. p. 509. Ernest. Lond. 1819. VOL. II.

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