357 
subject to tbe like moral vicissitudes. If our responsibility 
has anything to do with it, no part of the Revela- 
tion should through any fault of ours continue C an™t vela cin“ 
merely an external fact. So long as it remains so, externai merely 
it is to that extent inoperative. That which 
is external may lose influence very soon, and a positive 
law is as if morally dead, until it becomes an inward 
principle, — a power. 
148. Some illustration of this may be had from marking the 
case of any system of Positive Duty which has had wide accept- 
ance among men, and so proved its compatibility joro tanto with 
their nature. The law of Moses e. g. with its very definite and 
positive provisions, professed to come from GIod, Moral inl- 
and to be morally elevating ; yet the Lawgiver was the^Reveiation 
explicit in his assurances to the people that the giventoMoses. 
previous ordinary rules which govern moral affairs would not 
be departed from in their case. The people, and their new 
Revelation, would be subject to the contingencies of life and 
action ; and even the benefit of their positive law might, by the 
people’s misuse, become less and less. The circumstances of 
the introduction of that law, and the original influences, would 
naturally pass. After a few years, or generations at farthest, 
men would look back on that as obscure history which to con- 
temporaries had been vivid reality. If it had effected no 
lodgement in the conscience and heart of men, the tradition 
would grow faint and even change, and, as a law only, tend 
to become void of power. They were responsible, we find, for 
having that law, and then responsible for not responding to it. 
149. It is certainly very suitable to the responsibility of our 
nature, that external things thus have but a gradual influence 
on our inner life. It is a just counterpoise to that power 
of habit of which we have already spoken : and which is 
not to be thought of as merely mechanical. The external 
lives and has power to us in proportion as it corresponds to 
the internal. Any other conclusion might be destructive of 
Deontology ; and even if not so, would oblige not one Revela- 
tion, nor several, but a constant series. 
150. If we pass in like review the phenomena of Christianity, 
we shall find the same moral results. 
The mighty events recorded in the Evangelical histories as 
introducing the Religion of Christ passed away, Moral re . 
of course, with the generation which beheld them, view of the 
many of whom naturally expected them to usher in among Chris- 
the close of all things. Regarded externally, those tian8 ' 
marvels seemed to the natural eye to grow more and more 
dim as time went on. 
