TO THE RIGHT REVEREND EDMUND LAW, D. D. LORD BISHOP OF CARLISLE *. MY LORD, HAD the obligations which I owe to your Lordship's kindness been much less, or much fewer, than they are; had personal gratitude left any place in my mind for deliberation or for inquiry; in selecting a name which every reader might confess to be prefixed with propriety to a work that, in many of its parts, bears no obscure relation to the general principles of natural and revealed religion, I should have found myself directed by many considerations to that of the Bishop of Carlisle. A long life spent in the most interesting of all human pursuits, the investigation of moral and religious truth, in constant and unwearied endeavours to advance the discovery, communication, and success, of both; a life so occupied, and arrived at that period which renders every life venerable, commands respect by a title which no virtuous mind will dispute, which no mind sensible of the importance of these studies to the supreme concernments of mankind will not rejoice to see acknowledged. Whatever difference, or whatever opposition, some who peruse your Lordship's writings may perceive between your conclusions and their own, the good and wise of all persuasions will revere that industry, which has for its object the illustration or defence of our common Christianity. Your Lordship's researches have never lost sight of one purpose, namely, to recover the simplicity of the Gospel from beneath that load of unauthorized additions, which the ignorance of some ages, and the learning of others, the superstition of weak, and the craft of designing men, have (unhappily for its interest) heaped upon it. And this purpose, I am convinced, was dictated by the purest motive; by a firm, and I think, a just opinion, that whatever renders religion more rational, renders it more credible; that he who, by a diligent and faithful examination of the original records, dismisses from the system one article which contradicts the apprehension, the experience, or the reasoning, of mankind, does more towards recommending the belief, and with the belief the influence of Christianity, to the understandings and consciences of serious inquirers, and through them to universal reception and authority, than can be effected by a thousand contenders for creeds and ordinances of human establishment. Of Dr. Law, whose patronage so early and so materially befriended the author of this volume, it is needless to add any particulars beyond those given in the sketch of his life, written by Paley. He was an excellent and liberal-minded prelate, who, in some of his opinions, was supposed to have been fai from orthodox; to this Paley alludes, when he says, "there was nothing in his elevation to his bishopric, which he spoke of with more pleasure, than its being a proof that decent freedom of inquiry was not discouraged;" He and when Hone was tried for some parodies on the Litany When the doctrine of transubstantiation had taken possession of the Christian world, it was not without the industry of learned men that it came at length to be discovered, that no such doctrine was contained in the New Testament. But had those excellent persons done nothing more by their discovery, than abolished an innocent superstition, or changed some directions in the ceremonial of public worship, they had merited little of that veneration, with which the gratitude of Protestant churches remembers their services. What they did for mankind was this: they exonerated Christianity of a weight which sunk it. If indolence or timidity had checked these exertions, or suppressed the fruit and publication of these inquiries, is it too much to affirm, that infidelity would at this day have been universal? I do not mean, my Lord, by the mention of this example, to insinuate that any popular opinion which your Lordship may have encountered, ought to be compared with Transubstantiation, or that the assurance with which we reject that extravagant absurdity, is attainable in the controversies in which your Lordship has been engaged; but I mean, by calling to mind those great reformers of the public faith, to observe, or rather to express my own persuasion, that to restore the purity, is most effectually to promote the progress, of Christianity; and that the same virtuous motive which has sanctified their labours, suggested yours. At a time when some men appear not to perceive any good, and others to suspect an evil tendency, in that spirit of examination and research which is gone forth in Christian countries, this testimony is become due, not only to the probity of your Lordship's views, but to the general cause of intellectual and religious liberty. That your Lordship's life may be prolonged in health and honour; that it may continue to afford an instructive proof, how serene and easy old age can be made by the memory of important and well-intended labours, by the possession of public and deserved esteem, by the presence of many grateful relatives; above all, by the resources of religion, by an unshaken confidence in the designs of a "faithful Creator," and a settled trust in the truth and in the promises of Christianity; is the fervent prayer of, MY LORD, Your Lordship's dutiful, Most obliged, And most devoted servant, Carlisle, Feb. 10, 1785. WILLIAM PALEY. PREFACE*. IN the treatises I have met with upon the subject of morals, I appear to myself to have remarked the following imperfections;-either that the principle was erroneous, or that it was indistinctly explained, or that the rules deduced from it were not sufficiently adapted to real life and to actual situations. The writings of Grotius, and the larger work of Puffendorff, are of too forensic a cast, too much mixed up with civil law and with the jurisprudence of Germany, to answer precisely the design of a system of ethics-the direction of private consciences in the general conduct of human life. Perhaps, indeed, they are not to be regarded as institutes of morality calculated to instruct an individual in his duty, so much as a species of law-books and law-authorities, suited to the practice of those courts of justice, whose decisions are regulated by general principles of natural equity, in conjunction with the maxims of the Roman code; of which kind, I understand, there are many upon the Continent t. To which may be added, concerning both these authors, that they are more occupied in describing the rights and usages of independent communities, than is necessary in a work which professes not to adjust the correspondence of nations, but to delineate the offices of domestic life. The profusion also of classical quotations with which many of their pages abound, seems to me a fault from which it will not be easy to excuse them. If these extracts be intended as decorations of style, the composition is overloaded with ornaments of one kind. To any thing more than ornament they can make no claim. To propose them as serious arguments, gravely to attempt to establish or fortify a moral duty by the testimony of a Greek or Roman poet, is to trifle with the attention of the reader, or rather to take it off from all just principles of reasoning in morals. Of our own writers in this branch of philosophy, I find none that I think perfectly free from the three objections which I have stated. There is likewise a fourth property observable in almost all of them, namely, that they divide too much the law of Nature from the The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, was the first published of Paley's larger works. It appeared in 1785, in one quarto volume, under the title of "Prineiples of Morality and Politics,” and, as we have noticed in his Life, p. 12, was immediately very popular, although no bookseller at first would undertake the publication; and Paley was long too poor to run any risk himself. The correctness of some of Paley's foundations for his theory of morals have been often, and in some few instances successfully, attacked; certain blemishes have been by very careful research detected; but they are not of any great importance, nor would they be likely to be readily found without the reader set out on a voyage of discovery for that especial purpose: we shall not therefore detail them, since, we did, we must enter, in his defence, into by far too long an argument for a moderate annotation. Persons who may be anxious for such an investigation, will find all these objections contained in professor Dugald Stewart's "Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind," vol. 2. c. iv. s. 6, and his " Philosophy of the active and moral Powers of Man," vol. 1. p. 152; Gisborne's "Principles of Moral Philosophy," p. 90-102; Dr. Pearson's" Theory of Morals," and Dr. Brown's "Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind," vol. 4, p. 91. A vindication of Paley against his objectors has also been published by, the Rev. Latham Wainwright. There are some English courts which adopt, and are governed by the rules of the civil law; such are the Admiralty and Ecclesiastical courts, in which Doctors of civil law always practise as advocates. precepts of Revelation; some authors industriously declining the mention of Scripture authorities, as belonging to a different province; and others reserving them for a separate volume which appears to me much the same defect, as if a commentator on the laws of England should content himself with stating upon each head the common law of the land, without taking any notice of acts of parliament; or should choose to give his readers the common law in one book, and the statute law in another. "When the obligations of morality are taught," says a pious and celebrated writer, "let the sanctions of Christianity never be forgotten; by which it will be shown that they give strength and lustre to each other: : religion will appear to be the voice of reason, and morality will be the will of God.*" The manner also in which modern writers have treated of subjects of morality, is in my judgment liable to much exception. It has become of late a fashion to deliver moral institutes in strings or series of detached propositions, without subjoining a continued argument or regular dissertation to any of them. This sententious apophthegmatising style, by crowding propositions and paragraphs too fast upon the mind, and by carrying the eye of the reader from subject to subject in too quick a succession, gains not a sufficient hold upon the attention, to leave either the memory furnished or the understanding satisfied. However useful a syllabus of topics or a series of propositions may be in the hands of a lecturer, or as a guide to a student, who is supposed to consult other books, or to institute upon each subject researches of his own, the method is by no means convenient for ordinary readers; because few readers are such thinkers as to want only a hint to set their thoughts at work upon; or such as will pause and tarry at every proposition, till they have traced out its dependency, proof, relation, and consequences, before they permit themselves to step on to another. A respectable writer of this class has comprised his doctrine of slavery in the three following propositions: "No one is born a slave; because every one is born with all his original rights." "No one can become a slave; because no one from being a person can, in the language of the Roman law, become a thing, or subject of property." "The supposed property of the master in the slave, therefore, is matter of usurpation, not of right." It may be possible to deduce from these few adages, such a theory of the primitive rights of human nature, as will evince the illegality of slavery: but surely an author requires too much of his reader, when he expects him to make these deductions for himself; or to supply, perhaps from some remote chapter of the same treatise, the several proofs and explanations which are necessary to render the meaning and truth of these assertions intelligible. There is a fault, the opposite of this, which some moralists who have adopted a different, and I think a better, plan of composition, have not always been careful to avoid; namely, the dwelling upon verbal and elementary distinctions, with a labour and prolixity proportioned much more to the subtlety of the question, than to its value and importance in the prosecution of the subject. A writer upon the law of nature ‡, whose explications in every part of philosophy, though always diffuse, are often very successful, has employed three long sections in endeavouring to prove that "permissions are not laws." The discussion of this controversy, however essential it might be to dialectic precision, was certainly not necessary to the progress of a work designed to describe the duties and obligations of civil life. The reader becomes impatient when he is detained by disquisitions which have no other object Preface to "The Preceptor," by Dr. Johnson Dr. Ferguson, author of "Institutes of Moral PhilosoDr. Rutherford, author of "Institutes of Natural Law.” phy;" 1767. |