with any peculiar friendship, what it may be dangerous to our virtue to love; or if not dangerous to our virtue, at least dangerous to our peace, from the vices or follies, which all our care may be vain to remedy, and of which much of the misery and disgrace cannot fail to overflow upon us. In the ernotions of an opposite kind, before we consent to submit our happiness to that disquietude, which we must endure as often as we feel hatred, or anger, or lasting indignation of any sort,-it is in like manner, necessary to pause and consider whether it may not have been still possible for us to have been deceived, as to those supposed facts which appear to us to justify our malevolent feelings. We must not imagine, as they who err in this respect are very apt to imagine, that too quick a wrath is justified by the avowal that our temper is passionate; for it is the inattention to this very quickness of feeling resentment, which a passionate disposition denotes, that constitutes the chief moral evil of such exacerbations of unmerited anger, that are converted into a passionate habit by the inattention only. Our duties arise often from our dangers, and increase with our dangers. The adulterer does not think of justifying himself by the confession of the violence of his adulterous desires the liveliness of feelings which he knows to be unworthy of him, as they show him the greater peril to which his virtue is exposed, should render him more eager to strive to repress them; and he who feels himself most readily irritable, instead of regarding his irritability as an excuse, should, in like manner, look upon it only as an additional reason to avoid, most sedulously, every occasion of anger, and to consider the first slight beginning emotion, therefore, as a warning to beware.

I have already spoken of the advantage of looking to the bright sides of things; and it is not of less advantage, to have acquired the habit of looking to the bright sides of persons. In our just resentinent against a few, we are not to lose our admiration and love of the whole human race. We may have been deceived; but it does not, therefore, follow that all around us are deceivers. How much happiness does he lose who is ever on the watch for injustice, and to whom the very unsuspecting confidence of friendship itself, is only something that will require a more careful and vigilant scrutiny.

Farewell to Virtue's peaceful times!
Soon will you stoop to act the crimes,
Which thus you stoop to fear.
Guilt follows guilt; and when the train
Begins with wrongs of such a stain,
What horrors form the rear.

Thron'd in the sun's descending car,
What power unseen diffuseth far

This tenderness of mind?

What genius smiles on yonder flood
What God, in whispers from the wood,
Bids every thought be kind?

O thou, whate'er thy awful name!
Whose wisdom our untoward frame,
With social love restrains,
Thou, who by fair affection's ties,
Giv'st us to double all our joys,
And half disarm our pains'
Let universal candour still,
Clear as yon heaven-reflecting rill,

Preserve my open mind;

Nor this nor that man's crooked ways,
One sordid doubt within me raise,

To injure human kind.

On the general happiness which virtue, considered as one great plan of conduct, tends to afford, it would be idle to add any remarks, after the full discussions of the whole doctrine of virtue with which we were so long occupied. Where it is, there is no need of effort to appear happy; and where it is not, the effort will be vain. Nothing, indeed, can be juster than the observation of Rousseau, that "it is far easier to be happy than to appear so.” What inexhaustible sources of delight are there in all those ready suggestions, which constitute the remembrances of a life well spent,-when there is not a familiar place or persor, that does not recall to us the happiness which attended some deed of virtue, or at least some benevolent wish! "The true secret of happiness," says Fontenelle, "is to be well with our own mind. The vexations which we must expect to happen to us from without, will often throw us back upon ourselves; it is good to have there an agreeable retreat.” The delights of virtue of course lead me to those delights of religion with which they are so intimately connected. Even these, too, are to a certain extent subjects of a practical deliberation. We must, if we value our happiness, be careful in determining what it is which we denominate religion, that we may not extend its supposed duties to usages inconsistent with our tranquillity; and still more, that we may not form to ourselves unworthy notions of Him on whom we consider our whole happiness to depend. It is not enough to believe in God, as an irresistible Power that presides over the universe; for this a malignant demon might be; it is necessary, for our devout happiness, that we should believe in Him as that pure and gracious Being who is the encourager of our virtues, and the comforter of our sorrows.

"Quantum religio potuit suadere malorum,"

exclaims the Epicurean poet, in thinking of the evils which superstition, characterized by that ambiguous name, had produced;-and where a fierce or gloomy superstition has usurped the influence, which religion graciously exercises only for purposes of benevolence to man,-whom she makes happy with a present enjoyment, by the very expression of devout gratitude for happiness already enjoyed,-it would not be easy to estimate the amount of positive misery, which must result from the mere contemplation of a tyrant in the heavens, and of a creation subject to his cruelty and caprice. It is a practical duty then, in relation to our own happiness, to trace assiduously the divine manifestations of goodness in the universe, that we may know with more delightful confidence, the benevolence which we adore. It is our duty, in like manner, to study the manifestations of his wisdom in the regular arrangement of the laws of the universe, that we may not ignorantly tremble at superstitious imaginary influences, which we almost oppose to his divine power. How often have we occasion to observe in individuals, who think that they are believers and worshippers of one omnipotent God, a species of minor superstition, which does not, indeed, like the more gigantic species, destroy happiness at once, but which, in those who are unfortunately subject to it, is almost incessantly making some slight attack on happiness, and is thus as destructive of tranquillity as it is dishonourable to the religion that is professed. There is scarcely any thing, however insignificant and contemptible, which superstition has not converted into an oracle. Spectres, and dreams, and omens of every kind, have made cowards even of the bravest men ; and though we no longer stop an expedition, or suspend an important debate, at the perking of a chicken, or the flight of a crow, the great multitude, even in

nations the most civilized, are still under the influence of imaginary terrors that scarcely can be said to be less absurd. Of how much sorrow might the same account be given, as that which Gay ascribes to the farmer's wife :

Alas! you know the cause too well,
The salt is spilt :-to me it fell;
Then, to contribute to my loss,
My knife and fork were laid across;
On Friday too! the day I dread!
Would I were safe at home in bed!
Last night-I vow to heaven 'tis true-
Bounce, from the fire a coffin flew.
Next post some fatal news shall tell;

God send, my Cornish friends be well!*

The difficulty of distinguishing casual successions of events, from the unvarying sequences of causation, gives unfortunately, to the ignorant, too much room for such disquieting associations, which nothing but juster views of philosophy can be expected to prevent or dissipate.-The cultivation of sound opinions in science is thus, in more senses than one, the cultivation of happiness. When religion is truly free from all superstition, there can be no question that the delights which it affords, are the noblest of which our nature is capable. It surrounds us with every thing which it is delightful to contemplate, -with all those gracious qualities, that even in the far less degrees of excellence in which they can be faintly shadowed by the humble nature of man, constitute whatever we love and venerate in the noblest of our race. We cannot be surrounded, indeed, at every moment by patriots and sages,-by the human enlighteners and blessers of the world, for our own existence is limited to a small portion of that globe, and a few hours of those ages, which they successively enlightened and blessed,-but we can be surrounded, and are every moment surrounded, by a wisdom and goodness that transcend far more whatever patriots and sages could exhibit to us, than these transcended the meanest of the multitude, whom their generous efforts were scarcely able to elevate to the rank of men. If we but open our heart to the benevolence that is shining on it, as we open our eyes to the colours with which the earth is embellished, we have nature constantly before us,-and the God of nature, whose goodness is every where, like the unfading sunshine of the world. When other joys are present, indeed, the pleasures of religion, it may be thought, are superfluous. We are happy; and happiness may suffice. Yet he knows little of the grateful influence of devotion, who has never felt it as a heightener of pleasure as well as a comforter of grief. "O speak the joy,"— says Thomson, after describing a scene of parental and conjugal happiness: O speak the joy, ye whom the sudden tear Surprises often, while you look around,

And nothing strikes your eye but sights of bliss.†

The tear which thus arises, is a tear of gratitude to him who has given the happiness, which the parental heart is at once sharing and producing, the over-flowing tenderness of one who feels in the enjoyment of that very moment, that the power which blesses him will be the blesser too, in after-life, of those whom he loves.

It is in hours of affliction, however, it will be admitted, that the influence is most beneficial, but how glorious a character is it of religion, that it is thus most powerful, when its influence is most needed, and when it, and the virtues which it has fostered, are the only influences that do not desert the * Fables, fab. xxxii. + Seasons, conclusion of Spring.

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miserable, and the only influences that can relieve. Religion is most powerful in affliction. It is powerful, because it shows that even affliction itself can make man nobler than he was; and that there is a gracious eye which marks the conflict, and is ever ready to smile with more than approbation on the victor. To the indigent, to the oppressed, to the diseased, while life has sil a single sorrow to be borne, it flings on the short twilight a portion of the splendour of that immortality into which it is almost dawning; and wher life is closing, it is itself the first joy of that immortality which begins.

The devout enjoyments of a grateful and confiding heart, then, are truly the noblest enjoyments of which that heart is capable,-not more from the purity, and vividness, and permanence of the direct pleasures themselves, than from the influence which they diffuse on every other pleasure, and on every pain of life. When we have accustomed our minds to the frequent contemplation of His perfections, who in requiring of virtue the little temporary sacrifices which it may be called to make to duty, has not abandoned the virtue which he is training by such voluntary sacrifices for excellence, to which every thing that can be sacrificed on earth is comparatively insignificant, it is then that we learn to enjoy with a delight which no others can feel, and to suffer almost as others enjoy,—that even the aspect of nature itself appears doubly beautiful in our eyes, and that every thing which it presents becomes, in one sense of the word, our own, as the work of our God, and the dwelling of those whom we love.

"He," says Cowper, speaking of such a mind,

He looks abroad into the varied field

Of Nature, and though poor, perhaps, compared
With those whose mansions glitter in his sight,
Calls the delightful scenery all his own.
His are the mountains, and the vallies his,
And the resplendent rivers. His to enjoy,
With a propriety that none can feel,
But who with filial confidence inspir'd,

Can lift to Heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
And smiling say, "My father made them all."
Are they not his, by a peculiar right,
Whose eye they fill with tears of holy joy,

Whose heart with praise, and whose exalted mind,
With worthy thoughts of that unwearied love,-
That plann'd, and built, and still upholds a world,
So cloth'd with beauty, for rebellious man ?*

Of all that extensive variety of subjects, which in my first Lecture, I represented to you as belonging to my academic department, we have now, with the exception of the single division of Political Economy, considered the whole with as attentive examination as the narrow limits of such a course will admit. That one division, which, from the multiplicity of our subjects, that were more intimately related to each other, I have been obliged to omit, has been reserved by me as the subject of a separate course. Its doctrines are far too extensive, to be treated in a few Lectures; and the time, therefore, which could only have been wasted in a superficial and frivolous sketch of principles, that require to be analyzed before they can be understood, or at least understood with conviction and profit, I preferred to give to a little fuller elucidation of doctrines that were more immediately under our review.

* Task, Book V.

THE END.

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