in general of ready solution; that without this enlightenment and sensibility no rule will have real value.

62. REPUTATION.-"A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches." This maxim of the wise man is fully endorsed by experience. The true man, whatever his station and calling, values a good name more than any temporary advantage, for reputation once lost is very difficult to recover; and without it all other possessions are a mockery.

The motives for injuring another's reputation are varied; sometimes from desire to avenge an insult, fancied or real; sometimes to get the advantage of a rival for popular favor, social or political; often from mere thoughtlessness and love of talk and notoriety.

These motives are all bad, and the acts they lead to are more or less criminal-the robbery of one's neighbor, so far as such means influence, of his most valuable possession. Fortunately sensible people pay little attention to idle tales, and the slanderer harms chiefly himself in reputation, and lays himself liable to severe punishment, if his victim should think it necessary to resort to the law for redress.

There is, too, a peculiar meanness in talking about, perhaps gloating over, the faults of others, when, it does no good, when there is no good end in view-especially over faults long ago committed-slips made partly from inexperience and lack of proper moral training, and a wise perception of moral relations-rights, duties and obligations-rather than

from an evil disposition-the love and desire for wrong-doing.

The person maligned for these sins may long since have repented of them, and be standing today on a much higher plane of morality, in thought, soul and act, than his would-be traducer.

DIVISION IV. INSTITUTIONS.

63. INSTITUTIONS, AS TO ORIGIN AND CHARACTER. Their name is legion, from the institutions of nature and those logically derived therefrom, to the minor artificial organizations devised and established by man for various purposes, such as the ancient institution of Free Masons; of Chivalry; or the more modern ones of the Knights of Pythias; the Knights of Labor, or in general labor unions; the board of trade and a hundred others.

Patriarchal, tribal and national forms of government are not instances of the artificial; but rather of institutions either natural or logical.

Chief are the institutions of marriage and of the Sabbath, introduced by Divine appointment at the close of the creation. The discussion of these will be found each under its own head.

Institutions.

Institutions, as to Their Character: such as the church, the public school, the temperance society, the Order of Free Masons, Odd Fellows, and many other organizations, may have in themselves moral tendencies; but moral obligation and duty are in the individuals that belong to and

support the institution; and each individual member of an institution is morally responsible just in accord with the moral tendency of the institution he helps to maintain.

In general, institutions are moral or immoral just as they are or are not organized on principles of sound morality. Thus marriage and the Sabbath, in their civil aspect, are moral so far as the requirements of the law and custom are in accord with the laws of nature.

Mormon marriage is not moral, because it violates the law of nature. So the church, as an institution, is moral as well as religious, because the design of it is the public worship of the true God, in accord with the first commandment of the moral law, as well as with the inculcation of the entire decalogue and of the moral precepts that abound in the teaching of Jesus. If, however, a church teaches and practices the persecution of those it calls heretics, the individual members of that church are violators of the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not kill;" and they must be classed and punished as persecutors and murderers, unless they protest and act against the crime, and manifest a readiness to sacrifice themselves, if need be, in the expulsion from their institution of the immoral doctrine, and the immoral utterers of it. Their reward for manly action would surely follow-the blessedness in the eighth beatitude, "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."

Members of temperance and of benevolent societies

are as individuals morally responsible for the moral tendency of those societies which may be good or bad just in accord with the wisdom or foolishness of their organization and management.

So, if the "board of trade" departs from its proper function as a guardian, conservator and promoter of the business affairs and interests of their city and community, and from legitimate trade, which is designed to be, and which generally is, beneficial to all parties engaged in it, and if it indulges in mere speculative, unreal transactions-its individual members buying and selling fictitious merchandise-wherein one man must lose what another gains it is mere gambling, a vice and sin that is forbidden by the tenth commandment; which sin each and every member of a board of trade so constituted is guilty of, and for which he is morally responsible.

And so it is as to the responsibility of each citizen in the matter of licensing the saloon, and in compromising with the gambling dens and others of ill repute.

The theatre is an institution for the healthy amusement and improvement of the people, but may be for their corruption; unfortunately the tendency is largely in this latter direction. Theatregoers and the negligent guardian of morals cannot escape responsibility.

The public school, as an institution being directly intellecual and moral, and indirectly religious and political, can be classified as educational, because the idea of education runs through all its objects; namely, the development of the intellect in a com

petent knowledge of literature and science, and specially the cultivation of the moral and religious sentiments, and so it does not perform its proper function as an educator of youth when merely the intellect is cultivated; for education consists in drawing out all the good native faculties of the soul; and this is the province of the public school, so far as it is practicable through its instrumentality.

To say, then, that the public school should not and cannot educate in the science of morals, including its relation to religion, is to occupy an untenable and immoral standpoint in the all-important matter of education, and it becomes each citizen to see how far his own responsibility in the matter extends.

64. THE IDEA IN INSTITUTIONS.-The general idea of an institution is well shown in Lieber's "Civil Liberty," and we make quotation thus:

"An institution is a system or body of usages, laws or regulations of extensive and recurring operation, containing within itself an organism by which it effects its own independent action, continuance, and generally its own further development. Its object is to generate, effect, regulate or sanction a succession of acts, transactions or productions of a peculiar kind or class.

"The idea of an institution implies a degree of self-government. Laws act through human agents, and these are, in the case of institutions, their officers or members.

"We are likewise in the habit of calling single laws