276 VESTIGES OE THE 



save this virtuous man. So it might l)e that, of two 

 physicians, attending fever cases, in a mean part of a 

 hirge city, the one an excellent citizen, may stand in 

 such a position with resspect to the beds of the patients 

 as to catch the infection, of which he dies in a few days, 

 while the other, a bad husband and father, and who, 

 unlike the other, only attends such cases with selfish 

 ends, takes care to be as much as possible out of the 

 stream of infection, and accordingly escapes. In both of 

 these cases man's sense of good and evil — his faculty of 

 conscientiousness — would incline him to destine the 

 vicious man to destruction and save the virtuous. But 

 the Great Kuler of Nature does not act on such 

 principles. He has established laws for the operation of 

 inanimate matter, which are quite unswerving, so that, 

 when we know them, w^e have only to act in a certain 

 way with respect to them, in order to obtain all the 

 benefits and avoid all the evils connected with them. 

 He has likewise established moral laws in our nature, 

 which are equally unswerving (allowing for their wider 

 range of action), and from obedience to which unfailing 

 good is to be derived. But the two sets of laws are 

 independent of each other. Obedience to each gives 

 only its own proper advantage, not the advantage proper 

 to the other. Hence it is that virtue forms no protec- 

 tion against the evils connected with the physical laws, 

 while, on the other hand, a man skilled in, and attentive 

 to these, but unrighteous and disregardful of his neigh- 

 bour, is in like manner not protected by his attention to 

 physical circumstances from the proper consequences 

 of neglect or ])reach of the moral laws. 



Thus it is that the innocence of the party suffering for 

 the faults of a i)arent, or of any other person or set of 



