ON HUMAN HAPPINESS, 



397 



such cases till they are before him ; and if he could, the whole world would 

 not contain the statute books that should be written upon the subject. 



There are also duties which a man owes to himself as well as to his neigh- 

 bour; or, inotiier words, human happiness, as we have already seen, depends 

 almost as largely upon his exercise of private as of public virtues. But the 

 eye of civil law cannot follow him into the performance of these duties, for 

 it cannot follow him into his privacy : it cannot take cognizance of his per- 

 sonal faults or offences, nor often apply its sanction if it could do so. And 

 hence, in most countries, this important part of morality is purposely left out 

 of the civil code, as a hopeless and intractable subject. Yet even in the 

 breach of public duties, specifically stated and provided for, it cannot always 

 follow up the offender, and apply the punishment: for he may secrete himself 

 among his own colleagues, and elude, or he may abandon his country, and 

 defy, the arm of justice. 



There seems, then, to be a something still wanting. If the Deity have so 

 benevolently willed the happiness of man, and made virtue the rule of that 

 happiness, ought he not upon the same principle of benevolence, to have de- 

 clared his will more openly than by the mere and, at times, doubtful infer- 

 "ences of reason? in characters, indeed, so plain, that he who runs may 

 read] and ought he not also to have employed sanctions so universal as to 

 cover every case, and so weighty as to command every attention? 



As a being of infinite benevolence, undoubtedly he ought. And what, m 

 this character, he ought to have d^ne, he has actually accomplished. He has 

 declared his will by an express revelation, and has thus confirmed the voice 

 of reason by a voice from heaven: he has made this revelation a written law, 

 and has enforced it by the strongest sanctions to which the mind of man can 

 be open: — not only by his best chance of happiness here, but by all his hopes 

 and expectations of happiness hereafter. And he has hence completed the 

 code of human obligations, by adding to the duties which we owe to our 

 neighbour and to ourselves, a clear rescript of those we owe to our Maker. 

 Nor is such revelation of recent date ; for a state of retributive justice beyond 

 the grave constituted, as we have already seen, the belief of mankind in the 

 earliest ages of time ; and amid all the revolutions the v/orld has witnessed, 

 amid the most savage barbarism, and the foulest idolatries, there never perhaps 

 has been a country in which all traces of it have been entirely lost, or have 

 even entirely ceased to operate. 



At different periods, and in different manners, the Deity has renewed this 

 divine communication, according as his infinite wisdom has seen the world 

 stand in need of it. New doctrines and discoveries — and doctrines and disco- 

 veries, too, of the highest in.portance, but which it is not my providence to 

 touch upon in the present plaf-e — have in every instance accompanied such re- 

 newal, justificatory of the supernatural interposition. But the sanction has, in 

 every instance, been the same ; while, and 1 speak it with reverence, the 

 proofs of divine benevolence have with every promulgation been growing 

 fuller and fuller: — revealed religion thus co-operating with natural, co-ope- 

 rating with the great frame of the visible world, co-operating with every pulse 

 and feeling of our own hearts in establishing the delightful truth, that God is 

 Love; and in calling upon us to love him, not from any cold and lifeless pic- 

 ture of the abstract beauty of holiness, beautiful as it unquestionably is in 

 itself, but from the touching and all-subduing motive — because he first 



LOVED us. 



