whether for the purity of its general maxims, the value of its collection, or the justness of its arrangement, without sentiments of the profoundest love and admiration.

Many and valuable are the precepts of the sages of antiquity, and though sometimes defective in their matter, on account of the false or partial principle of moral obligation from which they sprung, both the method and style in which they are delivered, form admirable models of all future imitation. Their defects are owing to the separation which they made of the three great and fundamental truths, on the inviolable union of which all moral reasoning should be grounded,--Plato having been exclusively the patron of the one, Aristotle of the other, and Zeno of the third-above all; in not paying a just attention to the true origin and end of all moral action, -the will and attributes of God.

Some of our modern philosophers have not only neglected their virtues, but have

"On these three principles, the moral sense, the essential difference in human actions, and the will of God,—is built the whole edifice of practical morality."-Warburton.

imitated and outraged their faults, although a far more perfect exemplar of morality has been received from heaven. In their eternal squabbles about the true foundation of morality, and the obligation to its practice, they have sacrilegiously untwisted this threefold cord; and each running away with the part he esteemed strongest, hath affixed that to the throne of God, as the golden chain that is to unite and draw all to it""Thus a spirit of dispute and refinement hath so entangled and confounded all our conclusions on a subject, in itself very clear and intelligible, that were morality herself, of which the ancients made a goddess, to appear in person among men and be questioned concerning her birth, she would be tempted to answer as Homer does in Lucian, that her commentators had so learnedly embarrassed the dispute, that she was now as much at a loss as they to account for her original." "Thus have men, borne away by a fondness to their own idle systems, presumptuously broken in upon that triple barrier, with which God has been graciously pleased to cover and secure virtue, and given advan

tage to the cavils of libertines and infidels; who, on each of these principles thus advanced on the ruins of the other two, have reciprocally forged a scheme of religion independent of morality, and a scheme of morality independent of religion; who, how different soever their employments may appear, are indeed but twisting the same cord at different ends, the plain design of both being to overthrow religion"."

This quotation is made up of several distinct sentences in Warburton's Legation, book i. chap. 4, and can scarcely be understood, without referring to the original.

On the general subject of this chapter, consult Sir J. Mackintosh's Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy, Bishop Butler's Sermons on Human Nature, Blakey's History of Moral Science, Stewart's Elements of Moral Philosophy, Reid on the Active Powers, &c. &c.-Editor.

IN

SECT. III.

Of Ethical Truth.

spite of all the difficulties thrown in the way of ethical science by the enemies of virtue, and the darkness which hath been drawn over the scene of moral action by many of its mistaken friends, moral truth is still able, by her native energy, to force her way through all the obstruction and obscurity in which she has been involved by art or ignorance.

"The divine Author," says an able moralist and theologian, "hath so wonderfully contrived human nature, that there needs little more in moral matters, than plainly and clearly to represent any instruction to the mind, in order to procure its assent. Whatever be the instruction, whether it affirm this conduct to be virtuous, or that vicious, if the mind be in a natural state, it more than sees,-it feels the truth or falsehood. The appeal is directly made to cer

tain correspondent sentiments of right and wrong instantly excited by the moral propo

sition 1."

However vitiated and corrupted, the moral sense will never be extinguished; and though the middle axioms and subordinate propositions, which are the means of ethical reasoning, may be multiplied by relations and varied by circumstances, and carried to a considerable extent. Ethical conclusions, as they are all ultimately founded on one or other of the universal principles of good and evil evinced by this predominant criterion, which carries its light down the whole of the moral scale, will always be accompanied with a clear and strong conviction.

Mr. Locke has indeed thrown out a conjecture in different parts of his celebrated Essay, that as ethical ideas are what he is pleased to call real essences, and archetypes of the mind's own making, complete and adequate in themselves, as well as mathematical; and as demonstration in his mind