ment, the rightfulness of which, as a general rule, we should hesitate or refuse to affirm. Again, our affections have by nature a certain affinity to right, and repugnance from wrong; to right imperfectly, I admit, but yet not altogether untruly apprehended : they supply corresponding impressions to the understanding where the mind is undisturbed, and the understanding forms corresponding conclusions: strong passions, on the other hand, are plainly unnatural, as well as unchristian, and their agency is usually short, and overpowers but does not persuade the understanding. While, therefore, such passion has a great effect on practice in the tempestuous moment of excitement, by reason of the deliberative character of the understanding it has, as it were, scarcely time enough to force a way into our belief, which remains to be governed by such of the affections as have a more steady and permanent action. The second cause of discrepancy, then, is that action is more liable than belief to the sudden assaults of the passions. It is not necessary that we should draw any broad generic distinction between the passions and the affections; but we may define the former to be affections raised to such a height and violence as to baffle the understanding, and preclude for the moment its full action.

25. Next let us take an example to show that the jurisdiction of the affections is not exclusive. When we have begun to analyse that notion of enjoyment in Heaven which the Gospel presents, we find a want of

congeniality between its particulars, the life of thanksgiving and praise, and the like, on the one hand, and the tendencies of our own affections on the other. But the understanding has derived from independent sources a strong conviction of the power of God: further, it knows that our affections are not immutable; and that that power may hereafter render agreeable what is not so now: these convictions have an evident tendency to raise our belief towards Heaven as an object of desire, antecedently to the assimilation of our affections themselves to the food which will there be afforded them; and thus also to elevate both our belief and practice, but the first more than the last, because the last is more liable to be determined on the moment, in its particular acts, by the quick instinctive solicitation of the affections, before reasoning or reflection can take place.

26. I go on to state a fourth mode, in which it may happen that our practice should fall short of our belief, consistently with the theory according to which it has been attempted to show that the main subject matter of ethics is not in the understanding, but in the affections and desires, inasmuch as it is their office to form the models of those terms, which, when allotted in the mind to their respective ideas, become materials for the understanding wherewith to work. Now this mode is one corresponding in great measure to that in which the iris x, or the principle of confidence, operates according to the science of rhetoric. Under a stricter analysis than that science re

quires, we shall venture to term it the mode of substitution. Now let us inquire what this mode of substitution is, and how it may operate, not in absolutely lowering the standard of practice, but in raising that of belief.

27. Let it be granted that practice is governed in the main, or upon the average, by the state of a man's affections and desires, varying as they do, in their comparative weight, at different points of time. Now a depraved theory does not bring with it the same degree of pleasure as a depraved practice: consequently the temptation to a depraved theory is less powerful than the inducement to a depraved act, upon the same subject matter. In the case of the act, the pleasure is immediate, and helps to blink or hide the sin. In the case when the evil is to be conceived and to be entertained in the distinct form of a principle before it issues into practice, the pleasure is contingent and remote, and less able to raise a tempest of passion in its behalf; so that frequently the same degree of strength will enable us to repudiate a mischievous principle, which will not enable us, when the occasion is immediate, to refuse an action such as can only be justified, and therefore such as can only with consistency be performed, upon that principle. The facts here assumed are, I think, as undeniable, as the inferences are direct and logical. And hence St. Paul* describes as an aggravated guilt that of those, who

* Rom. i. 32.

not only do evil, but have pleasure in those that do it: i.e., who begin to regard evil as a kind of law to their nature, as a principle authoritative in itself, and a bond, consequently, of union and sympathy: they are supposed to have reached such hardness as that they deliberately contemplate it in their belief, and are not merely surprised into it by negligence or passion, or want of self-government. With this idea it is that Milton, in describing Belial as the extreme of base wickedness, has placed him at the close of the infernal procession, and writes

“Belial came last: than whom a spirit more lewd

Fell not from heaven, or more gross to love

Vice for itself." *

28. From what has been said, it follows that the influence of example will be much greater in discountenancing immoral theories-e. g., that which declares marriage a needless institution-than in restraining immoral practice. To test this proposition, let us for a moment imagine, on the one hand, an immoral theory, with results supposed to be convenient or agreeable; and, on the other, an example of one whom we revere, sustaining an adverse (that is, a moral and true) theory: thus much at least is immediately manifest, that our affection to a particular person, on the one hand, draws us towards a good belief; our affection to pleasure, on the other, towards a belief which is false and evil.

*Par. Lost, b. i.

29. We are next to observe, that of these two influences the first is one which belongs to the class of substitutions. It is an influence attractive towards good, yet not towards good for its own sake, but for that of an intermediate living object, whom we love in the complex regard under which we behold him as a being made up of many faculties, and holding perhaps many opinions, some of them more acceptable to us, and others less so, but whereof all, being as it were parts of himself, do in effect, by association, derive an authority in our eyes from the fact of their being his, over and above what they would be able to exercise from their own intrinsic force. The influence leads us to follow good for the sake of a particular man who is good; and whom we love not perhaps at all for his goodness, or less for his goodness than his power or talent: we therefore substitute, for the proper object of our love, another, and follow the proper object because it thus becomes appended and tied to that other. And here it is clear that the affections are still, in many cases (e. g., where a beautiful assemblage of human virtues forms the attracting charm of the person supposed) the principal source from whence, though indirectly, are derived the materials for such an operation in the mind.

30. Here then the principle of confidence, properly so called, induces us to place the judgment of another, as expressed by his actions and character, in that position which is higher than we think our own entitled to occupy, on account of our love or other attrac