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FALSE MORALITY OF FEAR.

that the legislature were ignorant either of the spirit of law or the mind of the people upon whom it was to operate,-is a proof that the Law was not practical from the deficiency of its framers in abstract experience. In no country are so many ineffectual laws passed; and we might ask for no other proof to show, that in no country is there greater ignorance of the science of moral legislation-a branch of moral philosophy.

From this want of cultivating ethical investigation, we judge of morals by inapplicable religious rules. Bishop, thè murderer, was considered by the newspapers to have made his peace with God, and to be entitled to a cheerful slumber, because he did what? Why, because he confessed to the ordinary of Newgate the method in which he had murdered his victim! Public Charities, as we have seen, so fatal in their results upon the morality of a people, unless most carefully administered, are considered admirable in themselves; the turbulence and riot, and bribery and vice of elections are deemed necessary components of liberty. Some men adhere to the past without comprehending its moral; others rush forward to experiments in the future, without a single principle for their guide. Would-be improvers know not what they desire, and popular principles become the mere pander to popular delusions.

"When religion is unaided by moral science, there is ever a danger, that too much shall be left to the principle of fear. "To preach long and loud damnation," says the shrewd Selden, "is the way to be cried up. We love a man who damns us, and we run after him again to save us." This common principle in theology is transferred to education and laws. We train our children* by the rod. We govern our poor by coercion. We perpetually strive to debase our kind by terror instead of regulating them by reason. Yet not thus would the grand soul of Bossuet have instructed us, when in that noble sermon, "Pour la Profession de Madame de la Vallière," the great preacher seeks to elevate the soul to heaven. He

* So Wesley, who often concluded his sermon with "I am about to put on the condemning cap-I am about to pass sentence upon you: 'Depart from me ye accursed into everlasting fire," advises also the repeated flogging of children, and insists upon the necessity of " breaking their spirit.”—See Southey's Life of Wesley.

PROGRESS OF INTEMPERANCE.

187

speaks not then of terror and of punishment, but of celestial tenderness, of the absence of all dread under the Almighty wings. "What," he cries, "is the sole way by which we approach God and are made perfect ?-It is by love alone." A profound truth, which in teaching us a nobler spirit of religion, instructs us also in the three principles of education, of morals, But Bossuet's address is not of the fashion esta

and of laws.

blished amongst us!

I trace the same want of moral knowledge in our fiscal impositions. Some taxes are laid on which must necessarily engender vice; some taken off as if necessarily to increase it. We have taxed the diffusion of knowledge just a hundred per cent.; the consequence is, the prevention of legal knowledge, and the diffusion of smuggled instruction by the most pernicious teachers. We have taken off the duty upon gin, and from that day commenced a most terrible epoch of natural demoralization; "Formerly," says the wise prelate I have so often quoted, "when I first came to London, I never saw a female coming out of a gin-shop; I have since repeatedly seen females with infants in their arms, to whom they appear to be giving some part of their liquor."

Our greatest national stain is the intemperance of the poor; to that intemperance our legislators give the greatest encouragement;—they forbid knowledge; they interfere with amusement; they are favourable only to intoxication.

For want, too, of extending our researches into morality, the light breaks only the darkness immediately round us, and embraces no ample and catholic circumference. Thus, next to our general regard for appearance, we consider morality only as operating on the connexions between the sexes. Morality, strictly translated with us, means the absence of licentiousness -it is another word for one of its properties-chastity; as the word profligacy bears only the construction of sexual intempeI do not deny that this virtue is one of immense importance. Wherever it is disregarded, a general looseness of all other principles usually ensues. Men rise by the prostitution of their dearest ties, and indifference to marriage becomes a means of the corruption of the state. But as the strongest eyes cannot look perpetually to one object without squinting at last, so to regard but one point of morals, however valuable,

rance.

188

STATE OF LICENTIOUSNESS.

And what is very re

distorts our general vision for the rest. markable among us, out of the exclusiveness of our regard to chastity, arises the fearful amount of prostitution which exists throughout England, and for which no remedy is ever contemplated. Our extreme regard for the chaste induces a contemptuous apathy to the unchaste. We care not how many there are, what they suffer-or how far they descend into the lower abysses of crime. Thus in many of the agricultural districts, nothing can equal the shameless abandonment of the female peasantry. Laws favouring bastardy promote licentiousness—and,, as I have before shown, the pauper marries the mother of illegitimate children, in order to have a better claim on the parish. In our large towns an equally systematic contempt of the unfortunate victims, less, perhaps, of sin than of ignorance and of poverty, produces consequences equally prejudicial. No regard, as in other countries, by a rigid police order, is paid to their health, or condition; the average of their career on earth is limited to four years. Their houses are unvisited their haunts unwatched-and thus is engendered a fearful mass of disease, of intemperance, and of theft. Too great a contempt for one vice rots it, as it were, into a hundred other vices yet more abandoned. And thus, by a false or partial notion of morality, we have defeated our own object, and the exclusive intolerance to the unchaste has cursed the country with an untended and unmedicated leprosy of prostitution.

- is re

To the want, too, of a cultivation of morality as a science, all its rules are with us vague, vacillating, and uncertain: they partake of the nature of personal partiality, or of personal persecution. One person is proscribed by society for some offence which another person commits with impunity. One woman elopes, and is "the abandoned creature;" another does the same, and is only "the unfortunate lady.”—Miss ceived with respect by the same audience that drove Kean to America. Lady - is an object of interest, for the same crime as that which makes Lady an object of hatred. Lord ill uses and separates from his wife-nobody blames him. Lord Byron is discarded by his wife, and is cut by society. **** is a notorious gambler, and takes in all his acquaintance--every body courts him--he is a man of fashion. Mr.imitates him,

INFLUENCE OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY.

189

and is shunned like a pestilence—he is a pitiful knave. In vain would we attempt to discover any clue to these distinctions-all is arbitrary and capricious; often the result of a vague and unmerited personal popularity-often a sudden and fortuitous reaction in the public mind that, feeling it has been too harsh to its last victim, is too lenient to its next. Hence, from a lack of that continuous stream of ethical meditation and instruction, which, though pursued but by a few, and on high solitary places, flows downward, and, through invisible crevices and channels, saturates the moral soil,-Morality with us has no vigour and no fertile and organized system. It acts by starts and fits-it adheres to mere forms and names-now to a respect for appearances now to a respect for property:-clinging solely, with any enduring strength, to one material and worldly belief which the commercial and aristocratic spirits have engendered, viz., in the value of station and the worth of wealth.

CHAPTER VII.

WHAT OUGHT TO BE THE AIM OF ENGLISH MORALISTS IN THIS AGE.

Influence of Moral Philosophy upon the World-Evils of our exclusive Attention to Locke-Philosophy the Voice of a certain Intellectual Want-What is that Want in our Day-What should be the true Moral to inculcate— Picture of a Moralist..

Ir seems, then, that owing to the natural tendencies of trade and of an imperfect and unelevating description of aristocracy, the low and the mercantile creep over the national character, and the more spiritual and noble faculties are little encouraged and lightly esteemed. It is the property of moral philosophy to keep alive the refining and unworldly springs of thought and action; a counter attraction to the mire and clay of earth, and drawing us insensibly upwards to a higher and purer air of Intellectual Being. Civilized life, with its bustle and action, the mo

190

EVILS OF OUR EXCLUSIVE

mentary and minute objects in which it engages and frets the soul, requires a perpetual stimulus to larger views and higher emotions; and where these are scant and feeble, the standard of opinion settles down to a petty and sordid level.

In metaphysical knowledge, England has not advanced since Locke. A few amongst us may have migrated to the Scotch school-a few more may have followed forth the principles of Locke into the theories of Helvetius-a very few indeed, adventuring into the mighty and mooned sea of the Kantian Philosophy, may steer their solitary and unnoticed barks along its majestic deeps; but these are mere stragglers from the great and congregated herd.* The philosophy of Locke is still the system of the English, and all their new additions to his morality are saturated with his spirit. The beauty and daring, and integrity of his character-the association of his name with a great epoch in the Liberties of Thought, contribute to maintain his ascendancy in the English heart; and his known belief in our immortality has blinded us to the materialism of his doctrines.

Few, sir, know or conjecture the influence which one mighty mind insensibly wields over those masses of men, and that succession of time, which appear to the superficial altogether out of the circle of his control. I think it is to our exclusive attention to Locke, that I can trace much of the unspiritual and material form which our philosophy has since rigidly preserved, and which, so far from counteracting the levelling influences of a worldly cast, has strengthened and consolidated them. Locke, doubtless, was not aware of the results to be drawn from his theories; but the man who has declared that the soul may be material that by revelation only can we be certain that it is not so who leaves the Spiritual and the Immortal undefended by philosophy, and protected solely by theology, may well, you must allow, be the founder of a school of Materialists, and the ready oracle of those who refuse an appeal to Theology and are sceptical of Revelation. And therefore it seems to me a most remarkable error in the educational system of Cambridge, that Locke should be the sole metaphysician professedly studied -and that, while we are obliged to pore over, and digest, and

* Kant, too, has been only introduced to us just as Germany has got beyond

him.

Essay on the Human Understanding, book iv. chap. 3.