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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

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highest enjoyment must be in and from the same activity in which virtue consists. If, then, they may not be said to be identical, they are inseparably connected by a natural law, as much so as the light is with the sun. It is one of the properties and characteristics of the sun by which we define it, and as God made it, that it gives forth light; and it is one of the properties and characteristics of virtue as we always conceive of it, and as God intended it should be, that it gives forth its own natural, inseparable, peculiar enjoyment. It is an enjoyment that belongs to it, and inheres in it, as the property in its substance; so that the Stoics were right in saying that "the consciousness of virtue is happiness."

This brings us to the distinction between what may be called moral good and that which is merely natural. Moral good is that which is immediately, and by a natural law, connected with the normal activity of the moral powers; natural good is that which comes from the activity of any of the susceptibilities or powers below those that are moral. They are alike in being instances under the general law that there is from the activity of each faculty its own enjoyment; and in that sense both are natural; but what I have called moral good is not only the product of the moral powers, it has peculiarities well worthy of notice, and such as to fit it to be the good of the race.

One of these is its independence. By this I mean that it is wholly within the control of the man himself. This arises from the fact that moral good is from the direct activity of the will itself, and not from the activity of those faculties that depend on the will. Tyranny may fetter the limbs; want of discipline may render the faculties indocile; but virtue consists in the voluntary acts themselves, and in those voluntary dispositions which lead to

the acts, that is, in the activity of the will. This is central to the man. It is the man himself acting, and nothing can come between him and it, together with its natural results. It is not these results that are meant when we say we will do right and leave the result with God. These we conceive of as included in doing right. It may even be doubted whether, moral beings existing, the results could have been otherwise. The dispositions and volitions are one thing, the command of the faculties through which these express themselves is another. In the one is character; in the other ability. Any object of our desires we may be prevented by external circumstances from obtaining; but no will of another, no violence or imprisonment, no external circumstance can come between a man and his voluntary dispositions, together with the blessedness there may be from their activity.

This puts the highest interest of every man into his own power. If he have confidence in God, it gives him a rational ground on which he can stand and be a martyr. Here is a citadel that can never be forced; if it surrender, the man himself must open the gates. In respect to this, the exhortation may be fairly given as against any external influence, "Hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown." It is in this power of man thus to resist, in his allegiance to virtue and to God, all solicitation and all violence, that his true greatness is found.

It is at this point, as the will is differently related to the grounds of its action, that moral beauty and moral sublimity arise. When the propensities and faculties yield themselves in ready and glad coincidence with the virtuous will, when other moral agents conspire with it, and nature is accordant, there is moral beauty. There is no temptation then, and the current of the soul flows on without a

ripple. But when the propensities and faculties are refractory, when they solicit to evil, and would fain rebel; when example and authority are against us so that integrity would require resistance unto death, then, if the will remain firm, there is moral sublimity. In the one case the element is spontaneity, consent, and harmony of action; in the other it is force, struggle, victory. In both there is a sense of dignity, of freedom, and self-direction. There is the joy of the young eagle when he poises himself on his own pinions, and that something more which the eagle cannot feel that is involved in self-approbation and a consciousness of merit.

This leads us to a second peculiarity of moral good. It is that it is necessarily accompanied by a sense of approbation. This is an element wholly unknown till we reach the action of the moral powers. Up to this point we have a pleasure in all excellence; we admire it; but when we reach moral excellence, admiration becomes approbation. This gives a pleasure entirely distinct from that naturally connected with moral goodness. In the love of God or of man there is an enjoyment wholly distinct from the approbation. That is in view of the love, and subsequent to it. Love and hatred have in them respectively the elements of happiness and of misery, aside from any subsequent act of approbation or disapprobation. It is in these subsequent acts that we find a consciousness by the spirit of its own state as it is, or is not conformed to the law of its being, involving a feeling of self-approbation and hope, or of self-condemnation and of an indefinite dread. As virtue is in the states and acts of the will, so, if there be candor, the eye of conscience is directly fixed upon these states and acts; and so distinct at times do these sentiments of approval and condemnation become that they