evidence in this division of the subject is, in fact, more perplexed by conflicting arguments, and more exposed to contradictory conclusions. Dr. Paley has well remarked, that when we consider the benevolence of the Deity, we can consider it only in relation to sensitive beings. Without this reference the term has no meaning; for it would otherwise be without any medium through which it could operate, by which its influence could be felt, or its presence ascertained. Gross matter, as long as it remains inanimate and insentient, can never be an object of good or evil, of pleasure or of pain. It is alike unconscious of the one and the other. But, while the arguments for the power and wisdom of the Deity are so completely satisfactory as not to leave a doubt upon the mind, yet there are various appearances which seem hardly compatible with the idea of unlimited benevolence, and which it is difficult to accord with that supposition, except by travelling out of this visible diurnal sphere, and connecting the present life with a life beyond the grave. That the plurality and the preponderance of sensations in all the different classes of beings is in favour of happiness, cannot reasonably be denied; but if pain and misery are the lot of many, or only of a few, for a whole life, or even for short intervals, the argument recurs, how is this partial or temporary suffering to be reconciled to the theory of Infinite Benevolence? If pain and misery exist in instances collectively numerous, or in portions however minute, yet vast in the aggregate, how is this to be reconciled with the attribute of Unbounded Goodness, unless we connect an eternity of existence with the present transient scene? If evil exists, it is hardly a satisfactory solution of the difficulty to say, that it is not an object of contrivance, when the world is so constituted that it is more or less one of the ingredients, or accessories, in the condition of all sensitive beings. If the evil is not a part of the original intent, it seems an adjunct that cannot be disjoined from the present scheme; and if it be an adjunct of the present scheme, that scheme cannot be said to be a proof of Infinite Benevolence, unless we consider it only as part of a greater whole, and infer that the present is only the commencement of our sensitive and reflective existence.

In the works of human genius or industry, the object of the contrivance may differ from the effect, owing to the imperfection of the human faculties; but when we consider the operations of the Divine Mind, we cannot separate the object and the end; or say that one thing was designed and another produced, without impeaching the Supreme Power of weakness, or the Supreme Intellect of inconsistency. If in any particular contrivances in the creation, good was the object while evil is the result, can we reverentially affirm, that God willed one thing, but that a different was produced? If God is the author of all things, the evil must be regarded as much his contrivance as the good. If God made the teeth, he made them to ache as well as to masticate. The good of mastication is the principal object of the contrivance, but is not the evil of aching the occasional effect? In considering the sensitive works of the Great Creator in the present world, all that we can truly say is, that good, or pleasure, is the PREDOMINANT design, the primary object, but that evil, or pain, is one of the concomitant effects, or subordinate accessories. There is too much good in the world to admit the supposition of malevolence in the Great Author of the scheme; and there is too much evil not to lead us to expect a state of future retribution. Those phenomena in the present state of things, which militate against the theory of Infinite Benevolence, appear to be only presages of the good that is to come. If

the good even here greatly predominates over the evil, it is reasonable to infer, that in some future period the evil will disappear, and the Divine Benevolence be resplendent, without any apparent spot or limitation, in the condition of every individual.

In the commencement of the year 1805, while Dr. Paley was resident at Lincoln, he experienced a violent paroxysm of his agonising malady, which could not be appeased by the usual remedies; and symptoms appeared that his end was approaching. He languished, however, in a state of debility and disease, till the period of his return to Bishop Wearmouth, where he expired on the 25th of May. His mental faculties suffered little, if any, diminution to the last moment of his existence; but if his intellectual vision underwent no eclipse, his corporeal sight is said to have failed for a few days before his death.

It cannot be said of Dr. Paley that he lived in vain!-His was a mind of great powers; and in general he employed it for the noblest ends. He was particularly active in diffusing that knowledge which tends most to exalt the dignity of man; and raise him highest in the scale of virtue and intelligence. His moral and theological works reflect the highest honour on his memory; and if he betrayed a little seeming political versatility in smaller and more ephemeral productions, we may find some apology for his inconsistency in the times in which he lived; in his solicitude for the welfare of a large family; and in circumstances of which few have sufficient energy to control the agency or to resist the influ

enee.

In person, Dr. Paley was above the middle size, and latterly inclined to corpulence. The best likeness of him is by Romney, in which he is drawn with a fishing-rod in his hand. As in his domestic arrangements, and in his general habits of expense, he practised what may be called an enlightened economy, and observed a due medium between parsimony and profusion, his income was more than adequate to all his wants; and he left his family in easy if not in affluent circumstances.

A volume of sermons was published after the death of Dr. Paley, which he left by his will to be distributed among his parishioners. In clearness of expression, in harmony of style, and in force of moral sentiment, some parts of these sermons are equal if not superior to any of his other works. In the pulpit he was one of those preachers who excelled in bringing the most important truths home to men's interests and bosoms.-Though a few will rejoice, yet the majority of readers will lament, that in these sermons the author has abandoned his usual reserve with respect to certain doctrinal matters, which it is more easy to find in the liturgy and the articles of the church, than in the precepts of Christ, or the writings of the Evangelists.-Those doctrines which tend only to engender strife and to produce vain logomachies, would always be better omitted in the pulpit; and it is greatly to be deplored that in these sermons Dr. Paley has sanctioned their introduction. The great end of the commandment is charity; but can these doctrines conduce to that end? If this question had been proposed to Dr. Paley, it is not difficult to conjecture what would have been his reply, if that reply had been in unison with his unsophisticated sentiments.

The reader will perhaps not be displeased, if we add to this biographical sketch of Dr. Paley the following interesting anecdote, which he related to a friend at Cambridge, in the year 1795, while they were conversing on the early part of his academical life.

"I spent the first two years of my undergraduateship," said he, "happily, but unprofitably. I was constantly in society, where we were not immoral, but idle, and rather expensive. At the commencement of my third year, however, after having left the usual party at rather a late hour in the evening, I was awakened at five in the morning by one of my companions, who stood at my bed-side, and said, Paley, I have been thinking what a d****d fool you are. I could do nothing, probably, were I to try, and can afford the life I lead: you could do every thing, and cannot afford it. I have had no sleep during the whole night on account of these reflections, and am now come solemnly to inform you, that if you persist in your indolence, I must renounce your society.' I was so struck," Dr. Paley continued, " with the visit and the visitor, that I lay in bed great part of the day and formed my plan. I ordered my bed-maker to prepare my fire every evening, in order that it might be lighted by myself. I arose at five; read during the whole of the day, except during such hours as chapel and hall required, alloting to each portion of time its peculiar branch of study; and just before the closing of gates (nine o'clock) I went to a neighbouring coffee-house, where I constantly regaled upon a mutton chop and a dose of milk punch. And thus, on taking my bachelor's degree, I became senior wrangler."

Anecdotes of this kind, which have something of the marvellous, are seldom related with a punctilious adherence to truth: but if here be no erroneous statement, or inaccurate representation, Mr. Meadley appears to ascribe too much to the occurrence, when he attributes to it "not only his (Paley's) successful labours as a college tutor, but the invaluable productions of his pen." A mind like that of Paley could not have been long so indolent as is represented, without some compunctious visitings of remorse. It is more than probable that when he first received this friendly admonition, his bosom was a prey to some lurking pangs of self-condemnation; and he was consequently predisposed instantly to put in force a plan of more systematic and more vigorous application. Where the mat. ter of combustion already exists, a little spark will set it in a blaze.

In the treatises that I have met with upon the subject of morals, I appear to myself to have remarked the following imperfections;-either that the principle was erroneous, or that it was indistinctly explained, or that the rules deduced from it were not sufficiently adapted to real life and to actual situations. The writings of Grotius, and the larger work of Puffendorff, are of too forensic a cast, too much mixed up with the civil law and with the jurisprudence of Germany, to answer precisely the design of a system of ethics, the direction of private consciences in the general conduct of human life. Perhaps, indeed, they are not to be regarded as institutes of morality calculated to instruct an individual in his duty, so much as a species of law books and law authorities, suited to the practice of those courts of justice, whose decisions are regulated by general principles of natural equity, in conjunction with the maxims of the Roman eade; of which kind, I understand, there are many upon the Continent. To which may be added, concerning both these authors, that they are more occupied in describing the rights and usages of independent communities, than is necessary in a work which professes not to adjust the correspondence of nations, but to delineate the offices of domestic life. The profusion also of classical quotations with which many of their pages abound, seems to me a fault from which it will not be easy to excuse them. If these extracts be intended as decorations of style, the composition is overloaded with ornaments of one kind. To any thing more than ornament they can make no claim. To propose them as serious arguments, gravely to attempt to establish or fortify a moral duty by the testimony of a Greek or Roman poet, is to trifle with the attention of the reader, or rather to take it off from all just principles of reasoning in morals.

Of our own writers in this branch of philosophy, I find none that I think perfectly free from the three objections which I have stated. There is likewise a fourth property observable almost in all of them, namely, that they divide too much the law of Nature from the precepts of Revelation; some authors industriously declining the mention of Scripture authorities, as belonging to a different province; and others reserving them for a separate volume; which appears to me much the same defect, as if a commentator on the laws of England should content himself with stating upon each head the common law of the land, without taking any notice of acts of parliament; or should choose to give his readers the common law in one book, and the statute law in another. "When the obligations of morality are taught,” says a pious and celebrated writer, "let the sanctions of Christianity never be forgotten: by which it will be shown that they give strength and lustre to each other; religion will appear to be the voice of resson, and morality will be the will of God."

The manner also in which modern writers have treated of subjects of morality, is, in my judgment, hable to much exception. It has become of late a fashion to deliver moral institutes in strings or series of detached propositions, without subjoining a continued argument or regular dissertation to any of them. The sententious apophthegmatizing style, by crowding propositions and paragraphs too fast upon the mind, and by carrying the eye of the reader from subject to subject in too quick a succession, gains not a sufficient hold upon the attention, to leave either the memory furnished, or the understanding satisfied. However useful a syllabus of topics or a series of propositions may be in the hands of a lecturer, or as a guide to a student, who is supposed to consult other books, or to institute upon each subject researches of his own, the method is by no means convenient for ordinary readers; because few readers are such thinkers to want only a hint to set their thoughts at work upon; or such as will pause and tarry at every proposition, till they have traced out its dependency, proof, relation, and consequences, before they permit themselves to step on to another. A respectable writer of this classt has comprised his doctrine of slavery in the three following propositions:

"No one is born a slave; because every one is born with all his original rights."

"No one can become a slave; because no one from being a person can, in the language of the Roman law, become a thing, or subject of property."

The supposed property of the master in the slave, therefore, is matter of usurpation, not of right." It may be possible to deduce from these few adages, such a theory of the primitive rights of human nature, as will evince the illegality of slavery: but surely an author requires too much of his reader, when he expects him to make these deductions for himself; or to supply, perhaps from some remote chapter of the same treatise, the several proofs and explanations which are necessary to render the meaning and truth of these assertions intelligible.

* Preface to "The Preceptor," by Dr. Johnson.

Dr. Fergusson, author of "Institutes of Moral Philosophy." 1767. 21

There is a fault, the opposite of this, which some moralists who have adopted a different, and I think a better plan of composition, have not always been careful to avoid; namely, the dwelling upon verbal and elementary distinctions, with a labour and prolixity proportioned much more to the subtlety of the question, than to its value and importance in the prosecution of the subject. A writer upon the law of nature, whose explications in every part of philosophy, though always diffuse, are often very successful, has employed three long sections in endeavouring to prove that "permissions are not laws." The discussion of this controversy, however essential it might be to dialectic precision, was certainly not necessary to the progress of a work designed to describe the duties and obligations of civil life. The reader becomes impatient when he is detained by disquisitions which have no other object than the settling of terms and phrases; and, what is worse, they for whose use such books are chiefly intended, will not be persuaded to read them at all.

I am led to propose these strictures, not by any propensity to depreciate the labours of my predecessors, much less to invite a comparison between the merits of their performances and my own; but solely by the consideration, that when a writer offers a book to the public upon a subject on which the public are already in possession of many others, he is bound, by a kind of literary justice, to inform his readers, distinctly and specifically, what it is he professes to supply, and what he expects to improve. The imperfections above enumerated, are those which I have endeavoured to avoid or remedy. Of the execution the reader must judge; but this was the design.

Concerning the principle of morals it would be premature to speak; but concerning the manner of unfolding and explaining that principle, I have somewhat which I wish to be remarked. An experience of nine years in the office of a public tutor in one of the universities, and in that department of education to which these chapters relate, afforded me frequent occasions to observe, that in discoursing to young minds upon topics of morality, it required much more pains to make them perceive the difficulty, than to understand the solution: that, unless the subject was so drawn up to a point, as to exhibit the full force of an objection, or the exact place of a doubt, before any explanation was entered upon,-in other words, unless some curiosity was excited before it was attempted to be satisfied, the labour of the teacher was lost. When information was not desired, it was seldom, I found, retained. I have made this observation my guide in the following work; that is, upon each occasion I have endeavoured, before I suffered my. self to proceed in the disquisition, to put the reader in complete possession of the question; and to do it in the way that I thought most likely to stir up his own doubts and solicitude about it.

In pursuing the principle of morals through the detail of cases to which it is applicable, I have had in view to accommodate both the choice of the subjects and the manner of handling them, to the situations which arise in the life of an inhabitant of this country in these times. This is the thing that I think to be principally wanting in former treatises; and perhaps the chief advantage which will be found in mine. I have examined no doubts, I have discussed no obscurities, I have encountered no errors, I have adverted to no controversies, but what I have seen actually to exist. If some of the questions treated of, appear to a more instructed reader minute or puerile, I desire such reader to be assured that I have found them occasions of difficulty to young minds; and what I have observed in young minds, I should expect to meet with in all who approach these subjects for the first time. Upon each article of human duty, I have combined with the conclusions of reason the declarations of Scripture, when they are to be had, as of coordinate authority, and as both terminating in the same sanctions.

In the manner of the work, I have endeavoured so to attemper the opposite plans above animadverted upon, as that the reader may not accuse me either of too much haste, or too much delay. I have be. stowed upon each subject enough of dissertation to give a body and substance to the chapter in which it is treated of, as well as coherence and perspicuity: on the other hand, I have seldom, I hope, exercised the patience of the reader by the length and prolixity of my essays, or disappointed that patience at last by the tenuity and unimportance of the conclusion.

There are two particulars in the following work, for which it may be thought necessary that I should offer some excuse. The first of which is, that I have scarcely ever referred to any other book; or mentioned the name of the author whose thoughts, and sometimes, possibly, whose very expressions I have adopted. My method of writing has constantly been this: to extract what I could from my own stores and my own reflections in the first place; to put down that, and afterwards to consult upon each subject such readings as fell in my way: which order, I am convinced, is the only one whereby any person can keep his thoughts from sliding into other men's trains. The effect of such a plan upon the production itself will be, that, whilst some parts in matter or manner may be new, others will be little else than a repetition of the old. I make no pretensions to perfect originality: I claim to be something more than a mere compiler. Much, no doubt, is borrowed; but the fact is, that the notes for this work having been prepared for some years, and such things having been from time to time inserted in them as appeared to me worth preserving, and such insertions made commonly without the name of the author from whom they were taken, I should, at this time, have found a difficulty in recovering those names with sufficient exactness to be able to render to every man his own. Nor, to speak the truth, did it appear to me worth while to repeat the search merely for this purpose. When authorities are relied upon, names must be produced; when a discovery has been made in science, it may be unjust to borrow the invention without acknowledging the author. But in an argumentative treatise, and upon a subject which allows no place for discovery or invention, properly so called; and in which all that can belong to a writer is his mode of

* Dr. Rutherforth, author of "Institutes of Natural Law."