instance); the motive, or what is the influence by which we are urged to do what we think right.

These questions must be, no doubt, considered by the student; but after having been duly and regularly considered, a reasonable man may turn away, and adopting some system of benevolence properly understood, or of instincts and natural feelings, or both conjoined, leave such abstruse disquisitions to the schools, and be content.

All such modest and reasonable inquirers will be satisfied to perceive that the Almighty Master has so constituted us, that we cannot mistake our duties in practice, though he may not have given us faculties to understand them in their elementary theory; that we know what we are to pursue, and what to shun; know all that is necessary for our own well-being here and hereafter-our own responsibility, his awful observance of us. These great truths are surely sufficient, though the great Creator may not have thought it necessary so to gratify our curiosity as to unveil to us the secret springs and movements of that moral machinery which (if I may so presume to speak) he evidently applies, and has always applied, to the sentient and intelligent beings whom he has placed in this our portion of his universe. ،، The secrets of nature" is a phrase familiar to every philosopher. These secrets occur in morals as in other subjects. All knowledge imparted to finite beings must end somewhere. By the phrase "the secrets of nature," the philosopher means only to allude to that part of knowledge which the great Author of our being and of the world has, in our present state, thought proper in his wisdom to withhold from us.

I will now offer you some extracts from Mr. Burke. They describe or anticipate, as I have announced to you, the moral phenomena which were already, in 1790, beginning to appear, and which, as you will find, afterwards did appear, in a most remarkable manner, both in this country and in the rest of Europe, as the Revolution proceeded to a degree as I have mentioned, which not living at the time, you cannot possibly conceive.

"But now," says Mr. Burke, "all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded

ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies (as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation), are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

"On this scheme of things a king is but a man, a queen is but a woman, a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order. All homage paid to the sex in general as such, and without distinct views, is to be regarded as romance and folly. Regicide, and parricide, and sacrilege are but fictions of superstition, corrupting jurisprudence by destroying its simplicity. The murder of a king, or a queen, or a bishop, or a father, are only common homicide; and, if the people are by any chance or in any way gainers by it, a sort of homicide much the most pardonable, and into which we ought not to make too severe a scrutiny.

"On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors, and by the concern which each individual may find in them from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests. In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows. Nothing is left which engages the affections on the part of the commonwealth. On the principles of this mechanic philosophy, our institutions can never be embodied, if I may use the expression, in persons; so as to create in us love, veneration, admiration, or attachment. But that sort of reason which banishes the affections, is incapable of filling their place."

And again, in another place,-"Four hundred years have gone over us, but I believe we are not materially changed since that period. Thanks to our sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century; nor as yet have we subtilized ourselves into savages. We are not the converts of Rousseau; we are not the disciples of Voltaire; Helvetius has made no progress amongst

us.

Atheists are not our preachers; madmen are not our lawgivers. We know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made, in morality; nor many in the great principles of government; nor in the ideas of liberty,

which were understood long before we were born, altogether as well as they will be, after the grave has heaped its mould upon our presumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed its law on our pert loquacity. In England we have not yet been completely embowelled of our natural entrails; we still feel within us, and we cherish and cultivate those inbred sentiments which are the faithful guardians, the active monitors of our duty, the true supporters of all liberal and manly morals. We have not been drawn and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff and rags and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man. We preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms. We fear God; we look up with awe to kings, with affection to parliaments, with duty to magistrates, with reverence to priests, and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected; because all other feelings are false and spurious, and tend to corrupt our minds, to vitiate our primary morals, to render us unfit for rational liberty; and by teaching us a servile, licentious, and abandoned insolence, to be our low sport for a few holidays, to make us perfectly fit for and justly deserving of slavery, through the whole course of our lives.

"You see, sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them."

By a prejudice, however, we do not mean an opinion that is necessarily wrong, but only an opinion that, whether right or wrong, is held by a man without his knowing the reason of it. Mr. Burke does not stay to give this explanation.

"We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that the stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages. Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice,

and to leave nothing but the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature."

Such are the sentiments to be found in the work of Mr. Burke; not only conceived and written during the spring and summer of 1790, but, as I must again and again repeat, published at the close of 1790, full two years before that stage of the Revolution at which we are now arrived, the execution of the king. It was followed immediately by another work, "A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly;" and again, soon after, by his "Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs;" a work well worthy to support his Reflections, and full of important wisdom. In each of them may be found matter of the same prophetic nature with what I have quoted from the Reflections. Of this, his greater work (the Reflections), the fault may be, and indeed is, that Mr. Burke did not sufficiently exhibit the prior offences of the privileged orders, and their want of political virtue and wisdom, the general disrespect into which the old government had justly fallen, by its long defiance of public opinion, and its disregard of its duties; the fault of Mr. Burke's work may be also, that he makes not sufficient allowance for the difficulties with which the members of the Constituent Assembly had to struggle, nor states the faults that were committed by the court party; but when all this has been admitted, as I think it must, such paragraphs as I have selected from the midst of many, many others of the same kind, show clearly a penetrating and philosophic mind, that saw distinctly what others did not see, the full danger of this invasion of the world by the new opinions; that, whether politically or morally considered, it was impossible that these opinions should lead to practical good; that it was not for the interest of France or of mankind ever to adopt them; and still less in so headlong a manner to cast off their old opinions; that the politicians of the day everywhere were too sanguine, too daring, too experimental; that neither in morals nor in governments could men be rendered wiser, or happier, by resolving, on system, to demolish every thing and begin anew; that this was neither the tone nor the manner of those who deserved to be

thought the instructors and improvers either of their own country or of mankind. These were the general views and doctrines of Mr. Burke, at a season of somewhat universal enthusiasm, running (and very violently) in a contrary direction, among the young and the intelligent more especially, wherever they were found; and this is a merit, and a very extraordinary merit, which, amidst all the faults of his mind (and they grew more striking as the Revolution proceeded), must not be denied him, and this has rendered his book (I speak of his Reflections, though not at all excluding, much the contrary, his Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs) so invaluable to the same description of most important persons in a community, the young and the intelligent, if they will but, as they are always bound to do, seize upon the wisdom of a book, and cast away such passages as may appear intemperate, and less worthy to be retained.

To them, indeed, thus considered, the reference being had to such objections as I have made, and as are sufficiently obvious, it is a work of the most eminent usefulness and weighty admonition, because the principles alluded to and enforced, are as unchangeable as Nature itself, and of an application that can never

cease.

LECTURE XXXV.

STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1792.

THE execution of the king is an epoch in the history of the French Revolution; it was the signal of the entire triumph, as I have already mentioned, of the new opinions over the old. From this moment no compromise seemed possible, the contest was to be mortal. This impolitic as well as cruel act was, on the part of the French Convention, a defiance of all Europe. "You have thrown down the gauntlet to kings," said the ferocious Danton; "this gauntlet is the head of a king." In this mortal strife between the new and old opinions, our own country was now to mingle; and this is too important an event in the history of the French Revolution, as well as our own, not to be recommended to your particular consideration. I have already, to a certain degree, prepared you for this subject, for I adverted to the effects produced on the friends of freedom in this country, and on our writers, by the rise and progress of the new opinions in France. I pointed out to you the memorable discussion that