448 



ON THE GENERAL 



There seems, then, to be a something still wanting. If the Deity ha ve 

 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 declared his will more openly than by the mere, and, at times, doubt- 

 ful, inferences 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 infmite benevolence, undoubtedly he ought. And what, 

 in this character, he ought to have done, he has actually accomphshed. 

 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 amidst 

 all the revolutions the world has witnessed, amidst the most savage bar- 

 barism, 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 discoveries, too, of the highest importance, but which it is not my 

 province to touch upon in the present place, have in every instance ac- 

 companied such renewal, justificatory of the supernatural interposition. 

 But the sanction has, in every instance, been the same : while, and I 

 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-operating with the great frame of the visible 

 world, co-operating with every pulse and feeling of our own hearts in es- 

 tablishing the delightful truth, that God is Love ; and in calling upon us 

 to love him, not from any cold and lifeless picture of the abstract beauty 

 of holiness, beautiful as it unquestionably is in itself, but from the touch- 

 ing and all-subduing motive, because he first loved us. 



^ LECTURE Vlll. 



OA' THE GENERAL FACULTIES OF THE MIND, AND ITS FBEEDOM IN WILLING. 



In the commencement of the successive series of lectures which I have 

 had the honour of delivering before this respectable school of science, I 

 stated, as it may be recollected by many of the audience before me, that 

 the subject I proposed to discuss would be of considerable extent and 

 variety ; — that it would embrace, though with a rapid survey, the whole 

 circle of physics in the most enlarged sense in which this term has been 

 employed by Aristotle or Lord Bacon ; and, consequently, would toucli 

 slicjlitly. yet, as I hoped, with a correct outline, upon all the more into- 



