acquisition of clear and distinct conceptions of our duties, and of the relations in which we stand to God, our neighbour, and ourselves, no such difficulties occur. At the utmost we have only to rescue words, already existing and familiar, from the false or vague meanings imposed on them by carelessness, or by the clipping and debasing misusage of the market. And surely happiness, duty, faith, truth, and final blessedness, are matters of deeper and dearer interest for all men, than circles to the geometrician, or the characters of plants to the botanist, or the affinities and combining principle of the elements of bodies to the chemist, or even than the mechanism (fearful and wonderful though it be!) of the perishable Tabernacle of the Soul can be to the anatomist. Among the aids to reflection, place the following maxim prominent: let distinctness in expression advance side by side with distinction in thought. For one useless subtlety in our elder divines and moralists, I will produce ten sophisms of equivocation in the writings of our modern preceptors: and for one error resulting from excess in distinguishing the indifferent, I would show ten mischievous delusions from the habit of confounding the diverse. Whether you are reflecting for yourself, or reasoning with another, make it a rule to ask yourself the precise meaning of the word, on which the point in question appears to turn; and if it may be (that is, by writers of authority has been) used in several senses, then ask which of these the word is at present intended to convey. By this mean, and scarcely without it, you will at length acquire a facility in detecting the quid pro quo. And believe me, in so doing you will enable yourself to disarm and expose four-fifths of the main arguments of our most renowned irreligious philosophers, ancient and modern. For the quid pro quo is at once the rock and quarry, on and with which the strong-holds of disbelief, materialism, and (more pernicious still) epicurean morality are built.
[39] Apud Ciceronem et Platonem, aliosque ejusmodi scriptores, multa sunt acute dicta, et leniter calentia, sed in iis omnibus hoc non invenio, Venite ad me, &c. [Matt. xii. 28.]
APHORISM II.
Leighton.
If we seriously consider what religion is, we shall find the saying of the wise king Solomon to be unexceptionably true: Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.[40]
Doth religion require anything of us more than that we live soberly, righteously, and godly in this present world? Now what, I pray, can be more pleasant or peaceable than these? Temperance is always at leisure, luxury always in a hurry: the latter weakens the body and pollutes the soul; the former is the sanctity, purity, and sound state of both. It is one of Epicurus's fixed maxims, "That life can never be pleasant without virtue."
Comment.
In the works of moralists, both Christian and Pagan, it is often asserted (indeed there are few common-places of more frequent recurrence) that the happiness even of this life consists solely, or principally, in virtue; that virtue is the only happiness of this life; that virtue is the truest pleasure, &c.
I doubt not that the meaning, which the writers intended to convey by these and the like expressions, was true and wise. But I deem it safer to say, that in all the outward relations of this life, in all our outward conduct and actions, both in what we should do, and in what we should abstain from, the dictates of virtue are the very same with those of self-interest, tending to, though they do not proceed from, the same point. For the outward object of virtue being the greatest producible sum of happiness of all men, it must needs include the object of an intelligent self-love, which is the greatest possible happiness of one individual; for what is true of all, must be true of each. Hence, you cannot become better (that is, more virtuous), but you will become happier: and you cannot become worse (that is, more vicious), without an increase of misery (or at the best a proportional loss of enjoyment) as the consequence. If the thing were not inconsistent with our well-being, and known to be so, it would not have been classed as a vice. Thus what in an enfeebled and disordered mind is called prudence, is the voice of nature in a healthful state: as is proved by the known fact, that the prudential duties, (that is, those actions which are commanded by virtue because they are prescribed by prudence), the animals fulfil by natural instinct.
The pleasure that accompanies or depends on a healthy and vigorous body will be the consequence and reward of a temperate life and habits of active industry, whether this pleasure were or were not the chief or only determining motive thereto. Virtue may, possibly, add to the pleasure a good of another kind, a higher good, perhaps, than the worldly mind is capable of understanding, a spiritual complacency, of which in your present sensualized state you can form no idea. It may add, I say, but it cannot detract from it. Thus the reflected rays of the sun that gave light, distinction, and endless multiformity to the mind, afford at the same time the pleasurable sensation of warmth to the body.
If then the time has not yet come for any thing higher, act on the maxim of seeking the most pleasure with the least pain: and, if only you do not seek where you yourself know it will not be found, this very pleasure and this freedom from the disquietude of pain may produce in you a state of being directly and indirectly favourable to the germination and up-spring of a nobler seed. If it be true, that men are miserable because they are wicked, it is likewise true, that many men are wicked because they are miserable. Health, cheerfulness, and easy circumstances, the ordinary consequence of Temperance and Industry, will at least leave the field clear and open, will tend to preserve the scales of the judgment even: while the consciousness of possessing the esteem, respect, and sympathy of your neighbours, and the sense of your own increasing power and influence, can scarcely fail to give a tone of dignity to your mind, and incline you to hope nobly of your own Being. And thus they may prepare and predispose you to the sense and acknowledgment of a principle, differing not merely in degree but in kind from the faculties and instincts of the higher and more intelligent species of animals, (the ant, the beaver, the elephant), and which principle is therefore your proper humanity. And on this account and with this view alone may certain modes of pleasurable or agreeable sensation, without confusion of terms, be honoured with the title of refined, intellectual, ennobling pleasures. For Pleasure (and happiness in its proper sense is but the continuity and sum-total of the pleasure which is allotted or happens to a man, and hence by the Greeks called ευτυχια, that is, good-hap, or more religiously ευδαιμονια, that is, favourable providence)—pleasure, I say, consists in the harmony between the specific excitability of a living creature, and the exciting causes correspondent thereto. Considered therefore exclusively in and for itself, the only question is, quantum, not quale? How much on the whole? the contrary, that is, the painful and disagreeable having been subtracted. The quality is a matter of taste: et de gustibus non est disputandum. No man can judge for another.
This, I repeat, appears to me a safer language than the sentences quoted above, (that virtue alone is happiness; that happiness consists in virtue, &c.) sayings which I find it hard to reconcile with other positions of still more frequent occurrence in the same divines, or with the declaration of St. Paul: "If in this life only we have hope, we are of all men most miserable."
At all events, I should rely far more confidently on the converse, namely, that to be vicious is to be miserable. Few men are so utterly reprobate, so imbruted by their vices, as not to have some lucid, or at least quiet and sober, intervals; and in such a moment, dum desæviunt iræ, few can stand up unshaken against the appeal to their own experience—what have been the wages of sin? what has the devil done for you? What sort of master have you found him? Then let us in befitting detail, and by a series of questions that ask no loud, and are secure against any false, answer, urge home the proof of the position, that to be vicious is to be wretched: adding the fearful corollary, that if even in the body, which as long as life is in it can never be wholly bereaved of pleasurable sensations,
