The Reason had now

and evil were objects of the Reason. had her business reduced to the employments of collecting ideas and general principles from experience, and of combining these according to the processes of discursive reasoning. How could any one find, in this series of operations, the road to eternal and immutable truths, concerning good and bad, right and duty?

Thus the doctrine of Clarke, like the opinion of Locke which I before mentioned, that Morality is capable of demonstration, may be considered as remnants retained by them of a philosophy then past;-propositions already antiquated when they were published ;-traditionary assertions repeated, because they who asserted them did not perceive how great a revolution the import of their terms had undergone. If Morality is still to be capable of demonstration,---if her distinctions are really steadfast and unchangeable,--we must seek some new source of just principles for our reasoning, some new basis of fixity and permanency. The discursive Reason, generalizing and combining the measures of good and ill which she obtains from the senses, can never soar back again into the higher region of absolute good; though she may retain some dim remembrance of it, which may still influence her wanderings in this lower world.

I

HAVE endeavoured to explain in my previous lectures

that the tendency towards the lower view of morality, which rests its rules upon consequences merely, had acquired an extensive and powerful prevalence in the beginning of the last century. This view had been connected by Locke and his followers with their metaphysical doctrines; and these again, besides their other recommendations, had been connected, how rightly or necessarily it may hereafter be our business to consider, but in men's minds they had been connected, with the general progress of science and knowledge, and of new opinions, which that period witnessed. And so striking and wonderful was that progress, that we cannot at all marvel if men were carried too rapidly onwards by the current, and were led to think that the new metaphysical doctrines which had thus formed an alliance with an admirable body of new truths, must be far sounder and better than the old modes of speculation, which had been pursued for so many ages with so little visible positive result. The two sides of the great alternative of the Theory of Morals, the Morality of Principles, and the Morality of Consequences, had been combined respectively with the old and the new metaphysical systems. Or rather, while the Morality of Principles, as a system, remained still involved in great perplexity and obscurity, the Morality of Consequences was perpetually worked out into clearer and clearer forms, and expressed in a more pointed and precise manner. Hence, both Clarke, who asserted the doctrines of the higher moral school in terms no longer well fitted to express them, and

Butler, who, maintaining them stedfastly, strove to avoid the responsibility of expressing them in any fixed and constant terms, produced little permanent effect upon the general habits of thought of their contemporaries. The Morality of Consequences, the doctrine that actions are good or evil as they produce pleasure or pain, was pushed further and further. A principle so simple and tangible, all, it seemed, could apply. All, or at least a great number of men, ill fitted for the office of moral teachers, did actually take courage and apply it. The reverence which, handed down by the tradition of ages of moral and religious teaching, had hitherto protected the accustomed forms of moral good, was gradually removed. Vice, and Crime, and Sin, ceased to be words that terrified the popular speculator. Virtue, and Goodness, and Purity, were no longer things which he looked up to with mute respect. He ventured to lay a sacrilegious hand even upon these hallowed shapes. He saw that when this had been dared by audacious theorists, those objects, so long venerated, seemed to have no power of punishing the bold intruder. There was a scene like that which occurred when the barbarians of old broke into the Eternal City. At first, and for a time, in spite of themselves, they were awed by the divine aspect of the ancient rulers and magistrates: but when once their leader had smitten one of these venerable figures with impunity, the coarse and violent mob rushed onwards, and exultingly mingled all in one common destruction.

The general diffusion of the estimate of moral good and ill by the pleasure and pain to which it leads, produced a profligate and sensual tone of moral discussion; and this extended with a rapidity not unaptly represented by the above image. As a prominent example of this spirit, we may take the well-known Fable of the Bees. This was a short apologue in verse, published in 1714, by a physician of the name of Mandeville, the professed object of which was to shew that

Private Vices are Public Benefits; that the vices, as they are usually held, of Selfishness, Luxury, and Lust, within certain limits, are the elements upon which the prosperity of a state depends, and, "that all the moral virtues are no better than the political offspring which flattery begot upon pride." The work possesses little or no literary merit; and is only remarkable for the notice it excited, and for the mode in which the author, when put upon his defence, supported his tenets namely, as I have intimated, by professing to trace to their consequences the courses which he palliated. The main impression which the book is calculated to convey is, the old licentious doctrine, that virtue and vice are only conventions for keeping society in order; that virtue has nothing really lovely, and vice nothing absolutely mischievous; but that on the contrary, our supposed virtues arise from the coarsest springs, and our vices often produce the most beneficial consequences; (see for example, pp. 83, 4); and especially that vice is an essential constituent of riches and greatness in a moral state.

The book was presented as a nuisance, on account of its profligacy, by the grand jury of the county of Middlesex in 1723. And although this circumstance may be alleged, I hope justly, as proving that the poison of the principles promulgated by this author had not yet entirely pervaded English society, we may observe, on the other hand, that the Presentment states that many books and pamphlets are published almost every week against religion and morals; and it assigns this general viciousness of literature as the reason for singling out this book, and another which is mentioned, for condemnation.

Similar complaints, most emphatically expressed, are made by almost all the Divines and Moralists of the time. Attacks on religion and on morals, (for these were, as may be supposed, very generally combined), were so common and

so licentious, that many pious and good men appear to have looked upon the progress of thought and feeling with despondency and despair.

In such a state of things it manifestly became the duty of the lovers and guardians of morality to collect their forces and put themselves in a condition suited for defence. They had been fighting loosely and carelessly, and disunited; so confident of their inherent strength, so relying upon general respect, that they had hardly believed the combat was in earnest. They had looked upon it rather as a mere academic disputation than as a trial in which their preservation or ruin was involved: rather as an encounter of wits for superiority, than as a struggle of moral principles for life. That the battles of speculators concerning Morals, Politics, and Religion were an affair of real practical import, heavy with the most solemn consequences, the history of the remainder of this eighteenth century showed too clearly; but it was only about the time of which I speak, that this conviction began to force itself upon the minds of the friends of the principles then established. It was however now plain, that the emergency was a weighty one, and that it behoved the teachers of morals and religion to provide for the safety of the host which looked up to them for guidance.

A bold and vigorous champion stept forth, and proceeded to order the mode of defence which the defenders of morality were to adopt. Learned in ancient and accomplished in modern literature, acute in the conduct of arguments, ingenious in the invention of theories, self-confident almost to haughtiness, sarcastic, lively, he was beyond doubt the ablest controversialist of his day. I speak of Warburton; who did, in fact, give to the theory of morals the form in which it has been received among us almost up to the present time. He, I say, at the time now under consideration, set himself to arrange the principles of morality in such a form that

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