God made him. The second was, Why ought he to do it? The answer was, Because of the intrinsic good there is in the end. The third was, How ought he to do it? The answer is, By the highest activity of his lower powers according to the law of limitation; and by the full activity of his highest powers upon their appropriate objects. Does any one inquire more especially what this activity is ? The answer is, Since we have shown the moral affections to be higher than the intellect, and since God is the highest and only adequate object of the affections, that it can consist only in the supreme love of God, and the impartial love of man. LECTURE VIII. RELATION OF VIRTUE TO HAPPINESS. — QUANTITY AND QUALITY OF GOOD. THE identity which we found in the last lecture between the teaching of the constitution of man and the law of God was not sought. The result was reached because the analysis would go there. I was myself surprised at the exactness of the coincidence. The formula we reached for the end and good of man was the highest possible activity of the highest powers upon their appropriate objects. Love has been shown to be the highest form of activity; and how readily and perfectly the law of God takes the form of the above expression will be seen if we observe that no love of him can be greater than that with all the heart, and no love of our neighbor can be greater than that we should love him as ourselves. It is a grand and beautiful thing thus to begin, as we have done, at the foundation of this lower creation, and to follow it upward as its stories rise one upon another till they culminate in man, and then to hear from his constitution an articulate utterance identical with an utterance from heaven that comes down to meet it. So is man fitted to be a being, as Milton says, — "Commercing with the skies." The teachings of the constitution, or of natural law, being thus identified with those of the revealed law, it would now be in order to go on and evolve the specific duties that would flow from this law as applied in the various relations of life. This might be done, as it generally has been, in the light of that disposition which would lead us to do good to all men; or, more properly, as more in accordance with the preceding course of thought, in the light of ends. The duties of man to himself and to God would then be determined in the light of his end as a creature of God; his duties in the family in its various relations would be determined by the end of the family, and his duties to society by the end of society. And this it was my purpose at one time to do; but that would be beaten ground; the time would not be adequate, and there are still speculative questions of interest, that are also practical, that require our attention. We need particularly just now to analyze this love with reference to certain general conceptions that have been formed, and their harmony with each other. We need to inquire after the relations to each other of holiness or virtue, and happiness. The revealed law is practical. It applies its precepts directly to a person; it says thou; and it requires duties to be performed towards persons. The objects are God and our neighbor. But the mind forms necessarily certain general conceptions. These are represented by general terms having no reality or one thing in nature corresponding to them, but simply the notion as it is formed in different minds, and which may vary much, both in its content and in its distinctness. The general notion of property may be in some minds clear, in others indistinct; in some it may be represented by land, in others by stocks. These general terms, formed by abstraction, and thus varying in their significance in different minds, have been . HOLINESS AND HAPPINESS. 183 thrown into the arena of discussion, and bandied about endlessly. So will they continue to be; the terms, as we may hope and believe, becoming in the mean time more definite, the conceptions of men in connection with them more distinct, and their relations with each other better established. Such conceptions, those too which have been the subject of much discussion, we shall find involved in the general formula already reached. Those to which I refer are the conceptions of holiness and of happiness. What is needed is that these should be uniform and distinct in the minds of men, and that their relations to each other should be clearly seen. There is a natural feeling that virtue, or holiness, and happiness ought to be united. Moral order seems to require this. In this world they appear to be often separated, and hence the strangeness of that state in which this world is. That holiness and happiness can be identified as objects of pursuit is denied by Kant, and it is in their separation that he finds what he calls the "antinomy" of the practical reason. According to him "the connection between them is not causal." "Man is bound to pursue virtue; man cannot but pursue happiness; and yet neither are these identical, nor does the one lead to the other." Of old the doctrine of the Epicureans was that "to be consciously influenced by maxims that lead to happiness, is virtue." The doctrine of the Stoics, and the opposite of this, was, that "to be conscious of virtue is happiness." "The identification of happiness with duty," says Whewell, "on merely philosophical grounds, is a question of great difficulty." Possibly our past discussions may throw some light on this point. In estimating enjoyment or good, regard must be had to both quantity and quality. The quantity from any given susceptibility or power will be as its normal activity. The quality will be as the rank, according to the gradation heretofore indicated, of the susceptibility or power. There are, I know, those who say that the only difference in respect to enjoyment is in degree. So Paley thought. They say that the enjoyment of the glutton is just as excellent and valuable as that of the saint or angel. Do you believe this? Do you think that any amount of swinish enjoyment could be weighed against one hour of the clear comprehension of God and his works, and of sinless and fervent love? I greatly mistake if there be not in the common consciousness of men, as there is expressed in their language, a feeling of gradation in respect to enjoyments that corresponds substantially with the order of the faculties as heretofore explained. When, however, we come to the moral nature, as we there make a leap in respect to the order of the faculties, so do we in respect to the kind of enjoyment. As we now come to have faculties like those of the angels, and are made in the image of God, so do we become capable of enjoyments like those of the angels and of God. Between such enjoyment and that of an animal, or of our own animal nature, there is as much difference in dignity and worth as there is between an angel and an animal. Here only do we find moral and spiritual enjoyments; here approbation and disapprobation; here the consciousness of worth. The above being premised, we say that the natural law and formula for the highest enjoyment is the highest possible activity of the highest powers upon their appropriate objects. We say, also, that the formula for virtue is the highest normal activity of the moral powers. But the moral powers are also the highest powers, and hence the |