Some simple souls, they suppose, there may be in the retired corners of the earth, that are walking in the chains of mechanical habit or superstitious piety, who have not the knowledge to understand, nor the courage to seek, what they want. But the moment they do act freely, they act, says our objector, upon the selfish principle. And this, he maintains, is the principle which, in fact, governs the world. Nay, more, he avers that it is the only reasonable and sufficient principle of action; and freely confesses that it is his own.

Let me ask you here to keep distinctly in view the ground which the objector now assumes. There are talkers against human virtue, who never think, however, of going to this length; men, in fact, who are a great deal better than their theory; whose example, indeed, refutes their theory. But there are worse objectors, and worse men; vicious and corrupt men; sensualists-sensualists in philosophy and in practice alike; who would gladly believe all the rest of the world as bad as themselves. And these are objectors, I say, who, like the objections before stated, refute themselves.

For who is this small philosopher, that smiles either at the simplicity of all honest men, or at the simplicity of all honest defenders of them? He is, in the first place, a man who stands up before us, and has the face to boast that he is himself without principle. No doubt he thinks other men as bad as himself. A man necessarily, perhaps, judges the actions of other men by his own feelings. He has no other interpreter. The honest man, therefore, will often presume honesty in another; and the generous man, generosity. And so

the selfish man can see nothing around him but selfishness; and the knave nothing but dishonesty; and he who never felt anything of a generous and self-devoting piety, who never bowed down in that holy and blessed worship, can see in prayer nothing but the offering of selfish fear,—in piety nothing but a slavish superstition.

In the next place; this sneerer at all virtue and piety not only imagines others to be as destitute of principle as himself, but, to some extent, he makes them such, or makes them seem such. His eye of pride chills every goodly thing it looks upon. His breath of scorn blights every generous virtue where it comes. His supple and crafty hand puts all men upon their guard. They become like himself, for the time; they become more crafty while they deal with him. How shall any noble aspiration, any high and pure thoughts, any benevolent purposes, any sacred and holy communing, venture into the presence of the proud and selfish scorner of all goodness! It has been said that the letters your friends write to you will show their opinion of your temper and tastes. And so it is, to a certain extent, with conversation.

But, in the third place; where, let us ask, has this man studied human nature? Lord Chesterfield observes-and the observation is worthy of a man who never seems to have looked beneath the surface of anything that the court and the camp are the places in which a knowledge of mankind is to be gained. And we may remark, that it is from two fields not altogether dissimilar, that our sceptic about virtue always gains his knowledge of mankind: I mean, from fashion and business; the two most artificial spheres of active

life. Our objector has witnessed heartless civilities, and imagines that he is acquainted with the deep fountains of human nature. Or, he has been out into the paths of business, and seen men girt up for competition, and acting in that artificial state of things which trade produces; and he imagines that he has witnessed the free and unsophisticated workings of the human heart; he supposes that the laws of trade are also the laws of human affection. He thinks himself deeply read in the book of the human heart, that unfathomable mystery, because he is acquainted with notes and bonds, with cards and compliments.

How completely, then, is this man disqualified from judging of human nature! There is a power, which few possess, which none have attained in perfection; a power to unlock the retired, the deeper, and nobler sensibilities of men's minds, to draw out the hoarded and hidden virtues of the soul, to open the fountains which custom and ceremony and reserve have sealed up: it is a power, I repeat, which few possess-how evidently does our objector possess it not-and yet without some portion of which, no man should think himself qualified to study human nature. Men know but little of each other, after all; but little know how many good and tender affections are suppressed and kept out of sight, by diffidence, by delicacy, by the fear of appearing awkward or ostentatious, by habits of life, by education, by sensitiveness, and even by strong sensibility, that sometimes puts on a hard and rough exterior for its own check or protection. And the power that penetrates all these barriers must be an extraordinary one. There must belong to it charity, and kindness, and forbearance, and sagacity, and fide

lity to the trust which the opening heart reposes in it. But how peculiarly, I repeat, how totally devoid of this power of opening and unfolding the real character of his fellows, must be the scoffer at human nature!

I have said that this man gathers his conclusions from the most formal and artificial aspects of the world. He never could have drawn them from the holy retreats of domestic life-to say nothing of those deeper privacies of the heart of which I have just been speaking;-he never could have drawn his conclusions from those family scenes, where unnumbered, nameless, minute, and indescribable sacrifices are daily made by thousands and ten thousands all around us; he never could have drawn them from the self-devoting mother's cares, or from the grateful return, the lovely assiduity and tenderness of filial affection; he never could have derived his contemptuous inference from the sick-room, where friendship, in silent prayer, watches and tends its charge. No: he dare not go out from our dwellings, from our temples, from our hospitals, he dare not tread upon the holy places of the land, the high places, where the devout have prayed, and the brave have died; and proclaim that patriotism is a visionary sentiment, and piety a selfish delusion, and charity a pretence, and virtue a name!

II. But it is time that we come now to the objection of the theologian. And I go at once to the single and strong point of his objection. The theologian says that human nature is bad and corrupt. Now, taking this language in the practical and popular sense, I find no difficulty in agreeing with the theologian. And, indeed, if he would confine himself-leaving vague and general declamation and technical phraseology

if he would confine himself to facts ;-if he would confine himself to a description of actual bad qualities and dispositions in men, I think he could not well go too far. Nay, more, I am not certain that any theologian's description, so far as it is of this nature, has gone deep enough into the frightful mass of human depravity. For it requires an acute perception, that is rarely possessed, and a higher and holier conscience, perhaps, than belongs to any, to discover, and to declare how bad, and degraded, and unworthy a being, a bad man is. I confess that nothing would beget in me a higher respect for a man, than a real-not a theological and factitious but a real and deep sense of human sinfulness and unworthiness; of the mighty wrong which man does to himself, to his religion, and to his God, when he yields to the evil and accursed inclinations that find place in him. This moral indignation is not half strong enough in those who profess to talk the most about human depravity. And the objection to them is, not that they feel too much or speak too strongly, about the actual wickedness, the actual and distinct sins of the wicked; but they speak too generally and vaguely of human wickedness,-that they speak with too little discrimination to every man as if he were a murderer or a monster, that they speak, in fine, too argumentatively, and too much, if I may say so, with a sort of argumentative satisfaction, as if they were glad that they could make this point so strong.

I know, then, and admit, that men, and all men, more or less, are, alas! sinful and bad. I know that the catalogue of human transgressions is long, and dark, and mournful. The words, pride, and envy, and anger, and selfishness, and base indulgence, are words of