MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE LYCEUM:--

      The desire of knowledge, and the power to acquire it, are, by a benevolent provision of the great Author of Nature, jointly vouchsafed to man. The centripetal principle of self-preservation which pervades every atom of the universe, the great globe itself, with every thing that lives and moves upon it, is not more universal than is the desire to know, in every being that has the power to know. This is the soul of the soul of man,--the energizing principle, which stimulates into action his whole sensitive, perceptive and reflective powers; and were it our duty to collect and classify the criteria by which to appreciate the intellectual capacity of an individual, we would give to his desire of knowledge an eminent rank among the evidences of his ability to acquire it.

      To direct into proper channels, and to control within rational limits, the desire of knowledge, have always been paramount objects in every government, human and divine, which has legislated on the subject of education, or sought the rational happiness of man. Indeed, the Divine Father of our race, in the first constitution given to man, suspended his destiny on the proper direction and government of this desire. He was pleased to test the loyalty of his children by imposing a restraint, not so much upon their animal appetites as upon their desire to know. The God of reason hereby intimates to all intelligences, that the power to control this master passion is the infallible index of man's power of self-government in every thing else. How wisely and how kindly, then; did he denominate the forbidden tree, "the tree of knowledge of good and evil"! And perhaps it is just at this point, and from this view of the subject, that we acquire our best conceptions of the reason of high intelligences--of the fall of that [95] mighty spirit whose desire to know, transcended the law of his being mid the object of those sublime endowments bestowed upon him. That he was experimentally acquainted with this paramount desire of rational nature, is obvious from the policy of the temptation which he offered. Its point was to stimulate, not the animal, but the intellectual appetite of our mother Eve, by dogmatically affirming that God forbade the fruit, because he knew that if they should eat it, "they would be as gods, knowing both good and evil."

      But while it appears most probable that all intelligences, angelic and human, embodied and disembodied, are superlatively fallible and vulnerable in this one point, and that their catastrophe was so far, at least, homogeneous, as to afford plausible ground of inference that the not holding or employing any power bestowed upon us in abeyance to the will of the donor, is. the radical sin of our nature, and the prolific fountain of all the follies and misfortunes of man; still the desire of knowledge is one of the kindest and noblest instincts and impulses of our nature. Without it, the power to know would have been comparatively, if not altogether, useless to man.

      The physical wants of the infant do not more naturally nor necessarily prompt his first animal exertions to find relief, than does this innate principle, this natural desire of knowledge, urge the mind into the pursuit of new ideas. The ineffable pleasure of the first conception only invites to a second effort; and success in that, stimulates to a third; and so on, in increasing ratios, till the full-grown man, on his full-fledged wings of intellectual maturity, soars aloft, as the eagle from the mountain-top, in quest of new and greater discoveries. And never slid the miser's love of gold bear a more direct proportion to his success in accumulating it, than does the desire of knowledge in the bosom of the successful aspirant after new ideas keep pace with his intellectual attainments.

      This again suggests to us a good reason for the variety and immensity of creation. Man needs such a universe as this, and the universe needs such a being as man, not merely as a component part, but as the worthy guest of it. Every thing that exists is to be enjoyed by a being who has the power of understanding and admiring it. Now, as the human power to know and to enjoy is naturally cumulative and progressive, the objects to be known and enjoyed must be proportionably vast and illimitable. And here again arises a new proof of design and adaptation in this grand and eloquent universe of God. For it is not only in the infinitude and variety of its parts--in its physical, intellectual and moral dimensions; but in the immeasurable aggregate of [96] its provisions, as respects variety, extent and duration, that it is so adapted to the human constitution--to this unquenchable thirst for knowledge--this eternally increasing intellectual power of knowing and enjoying, bestowed on our rational and moral nature.

      In all the language of celestial or terrestrial beings, there is no word of more comprehensive and transcendent import than the term universe. In its mighty grasp, in its boundless extent, it embraces Creator and creature--all past, all present, all future existences within the revolving circles of time, and the endless ages of eternity. Our finite minds, indeed, with all their gigantic powers of acquisition, cannot compass infinite ideas, but they can divide and subdivide the mighty whole into such small parts and parcels as come within their easy management. We have, therefore, divided the universe into innumerable solar systems spread over fields of space so immense as to make imagination herself flag in her most vigorous efforts to survey them. These systems we have again divided into planets, primary and secondary; and these again into various kingdoms--mineral, vegetable, animal, intellectual. These we have further distributed into genera, species and individuals, until a single individual becomes a distinct theme of contemplation. Even that we often find an object too large for our feeble efforts, and set about separating an individual existence into the primary elements of its nature, the attributes, modes and circumstances of its being, before it comes within the easy grasp of a special operation of our minds.

      But the feast of the mind, the joy of the banquet, is not found in these distributions and classifications of things, but in viewing every organ and atom of every creature in reference to itself, and to the creature of which it is a part; then that creature as related to other creatures of its own species and genera; and these again in reference to other ranks and orders belonging to the particular world of which they are atoms; and that world itself as connected with others; and then all as related to the Supreme Intelligence, the fountain and source of all that is wise, and great, and good, and beautiful and lovely--the Parent of all being and of all joy; and thus to look through universal nature, and her ten thousand portals and avenues, up to nature's uncreated and unoriginated Author.

      It is, indeed, a sublime and glorious truth that this to us unsearchable and incomprehensible universe can all be converted into an infinite and eternal fountain of joy, an inexhaustible source of pure and perennial bliss, commensurate with the whole capacity of man. But this, to us, is yet in the boundless future, and must depend upon [97] the proper direction given to our desires and pursuits in the contemplation and study of the universe. The fields of science are innumerable. But few of them have ever passed under the observation of our greatest masters. Not one of them is yet understood. The whole universe, indeed, is yet to be studied; and with such care and attention that the worlds, and systems of worlds--of ideas within us, shall exactly correspond to the worlds and systems of worlds without us. As exactly as the image in the mirror resembles the face before it, so must the ideas within us correspond to the things without us, before we can be said to understand them. What ages, then, must pass over man, before the single system to which he now belongs shall have stamped the exact image upon his soul, and left as many sciences within him as there are things cognate and homogeneous without him! Before this begins to be accomplished, the seven sciences of the ancients will not only have multiplied into the seventy times seven of the moderns, but into multitudes that would bankrupt the whole science of numbers to compute. If Socrates, the great master of Grecian philosophy, could only boast that he had attained so much knowledge of the universe as to be confident that he knew nothing about it--comprehended no part of it--how much of that science of ignorance ought we to possess, to whom so many fountains of intelligence have been opened from which the sage of Athens was debarred!

      But as there is nothing isolated or independent in all the dominions of God, so there cannot be an isolated or detached science in any mind, save that in which the original archetypes of all things were arranged before one of them was called into existence. And this is now, and always has been, the insuperable obstacle to the perfect comprehension of any one science, the basis of which is in the realms of mind or matter.

      Still the desire to know rises with the consciousness of our ignorance, and even of our present inability, and we promise ourselves a day of grace in which we shall not only know in part, and prophesy in part, but shall see clearly, comprehend fully and know as we are known. Till then we must be content to study the primer of Nature and learn the elements of things around us, as preparatory to our admission into the high-school of the universe. Indeed, the greatest genius, the most gifted and learned in all human science, rises but to the portico of that school, the vestibule of that temple, in which the true science of true bliss is practically taught, and rationally communicated to man.

      There is one science, however, in which it is possible to make great [98] proficiency in this life, and which, of all the sciences, is the most popular, and withal the least understood. It has been a favorite m ail the schools of the ancients, and of the moderns, but has never been successfully taught by Grecian, Roman, Indian or Egyptian philosophy. It is, indeed, neither more nor less than the science of happiness--than the philosophy of bliss. But some of you will immediately ask, "Where shall that science be found? In what temple does she deign to dwell? By what rites are her ears to be propitiated to our prayers? And by what less ambiguous name shall she be called?"

      To introduce her, without proper ceremonies, to your acquaintance, would be as impolitic on my part as it would be perplexing to my inventive powers to find for her a pleasing and familiar name. But, in the absence of such a designation, I will state the five points of which she treats.

      Whether it is because we have only five senses, five fingers on each hand, or because there are five points in Calvinism, and as many in Arminianism, that this divine science has only five points, I leave it to more learned doctors and sages than your humble servant to decide. But so it is: she has five points peculiarly her own, which no other science in the universe has ever been able to develop with either certainty or satisfaction to any man. These five points are--the origin, the nature, the relations, the obligations and the destiny of man.

      Many, indeed, of the teachers, admirers and votaries of a science sometimes called "moral philosophy," as taught by the ancients and by the moderns, have, with a zeal and devotion truly admirable, and worthy of a better cause, inculcated upon the youth of past and present times the sufficiency of human reason, or of human philosophy; to clear up all doubts and uncertainty upon every subject connected with man's relations and responsibilities to the universe.

      That there are sciences physical, mental and moral, truly and properly so called, I doubt not; but that the science sometimes called "moral philosophy," which professes, from the mere light of nature, to ascertain and establish--indeed, to originate and set forth--the origin, nature, relations, obligations and destiny of man--is a true science of the inductive order, founded upon facts, upon observation and experiment, and not upon assumption, plagiarism, imagination, I cannot admit. If, then, we cannot set forth the science of happiness, nor find for it, at this time, an appropriate name; we shall attempt to expose, in part at least, the fallacy and imposition of all human science (especially of moral philosophy, which in this particular arrogates to [99] itself more than every other science) in attempting to settle or develop any one of these five points with any degree of certainty, authority or evidence, either salutary or satisfactory to any man of sense.

      This is neither the time nor the place for mere definitions, metaphysical arguments, nor for abstract reasonings. A definition or two we may have occasion to offer; but we shall rely much more upon a safer and more palpable evidence in demonstrating the perfect impotency of philosophy and human reason, however cultivated, possessing only the mere light of nature, to decide and enforce any one of these five cardinal points.

      It will, I presume, be conceded by all persons of education and good sense, that human happiness demands the full enjoyment of all. our powers and capacities, in harmony with all our relations and obligations to the creation of which we are a part, and that a knowledge of those relations and obligations is essential to the fulfilment and enjoyment of them; consequently there is a very great intimacy between the knowledge of these points and the philosophy of bliss.

      It will also be conceded that the knowledge of our obligations and relations presupposes a knowledge of our origin and destiny; and, therefore, whatever system of reasoning, whatever science, fails to reveal these, cannot possibly develop those. These things premised, I hasten to show, that while moral philosophy proposes to do all this, she has never done it in any one instance--her greatest masters and most, eloquent and powerful pleaders being accepted as credible testimony in the case.

      That moral philosophy assumes to teach man his obligations and relations to Creator and creatures, and to make him virtuous and happy, is first to be proved. Whose testimony, then, shall we hear? That of the greatest of Roman philosophers--the most learned of her scholars--the most profound of her reasoners--the most eloquent of her orators--the most accomplished of her citizens--the unrivalled Cicero? He was, indeed, an honor to human nature; and, without exaggeration, in my opinion, the greatest man Pagan Rome ever produced. Many a fine encomium on philosophy maybe gleaned from his numerous writings; but a few sentences will suffice to imprint his views on every mind. "Philosophy," says he, "is the culture of the mind that plucketh up vice by the roots--the medicine of the soul that healeth the minds of men. From philosophy we may draw all proper helps and assistance for leading virtuous and happy lives. The correction of all our vices and sins is to be sought for from philosophy. [100] O Philosophy!" adds he, "the guide of life--the searcher out of virtue and the expeller of vice, what would we be, nay, what would be the life of man, without thee! Thou writ the inventress of laws, the mistress of morals, the teacher of discipline! For thee we plead--from thee we beg assistance. One day spent according to thy precepts is preferable to an immortality spent in sin."¹ So spake the gigantic Roman, standing on the shoulders of the more gigantic Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno, and a hundred others of minor fame.

      We shall next hear the oracle of modern philosophers who filled the chair of Dugald Stewart, the greatest of metaphysicians. "Philosophy," says he--quoting the most renowned of the stoics of Roman fame, the distinguished Seneca--"Philosophy forms and fashions the soul, and gives to life its disposition and order, which points out what is our duty to do, and what is our duty to omit. It sits at the helm, and in a sea of peril directs the course of those who are wandering through the waves." "Such," says our model philosopher in American schools, Brown of Edinburgh, "is the great practical object of all philosophy." "It comprehends," adds this standard author, "the nature of our spiritual being, as displayed in all the phenomena of feeling and of thought--the ties which bind us to our fellow-men and to our Creator, and the prospect of that unfading existence, of which life is but the first dawning gleam." (Vol. i. ch. 14.) Such, then, are the pretensions of philosophy, mental and moral, in the esteem of Christian as well as in that of Pagan sages.

      I believe this to be the orthodox creed of all the popular schools in Britain and in America. Indeed, both Hartley and Paley might be quoted as going still further, in ascribing to moral philosophy an almost superior excellence in some points even to Revelation itself. But we need not such exaggerated views. The preceding will suffice for a text.

      We shall now look for the exemplification of the fruits of this boasted and boastful philosophy in the admissions, declarations and acts of its teachers, and in the lives and morality of its students and admirers.

      The witnesses to be heard in this case are the Grecian and Roman lawgivers and philosophers. We have not time to hear them depose singly and separately: we shall therefore examine them in companies.

      The Greek philosophy is all arranged in three lines; as the learned, [101] since and before the revival of literature, have conceded. These three great lines are the Ionic, the Italic and the Eleatic. The Ionic was founded by the great Thales of the Ionian Miletus; the first natural philosopher and astronomer of Greece, who divided the year into three hundred and sixty-five days; observed the diameter of the sun; and foretold eclipses, about the middle of the sixth century before Christ. The Italic was founded by that great lawgiver and philosopher, Pythagoras, who established a school in Italy a little after the middle of the fifth century before Christ. The Eleatic was founded by Leucippus and Parmenides, of Elæ, early in the fifth century before Christ; the, chiefs of which may be alluded to in the sequel. These schools are all named from the country or place in which they were originally located.

      The Eleatic school was wholly atheistic, root and branch. Leucippus first taught the doctrine of atoms, afterwards adopted by the learned and facetious Democritus. While Heraclitus, the great Ephesian philosopher, wept over the follies of men, Democritus laughed at them, and taught that the universe was but the fortuitous concourse of atoms. The more refined and accomplished Epicurus speculated at great length upon the same theories; somewhat modified; and each of these great names headed a sect of atheists, who, while they agreed in the essential doctrine, differed in minor points. The essential doctrines of all the sects of the Eleatic school were, that the world was blade by the god Chance--a fortuitous concourse of atoms; that it is governed by no intelligence, ruled by no governor and preserved by no providence. That the soul, if there be any, dies with the body; consequently there is no future life. That there is, neither virtue nor vice, moral good nor moral evil by nature, or any other law than that of custom and public utility. That pleasure is the chief good, and pain the greatest evil, to man.

      With the moral theories of this school other distinguished philosophers concurred, amongst whom Lærtius ranks Theodorus, Archelaus and Aristippus, teaching that upon fit occasions (that is, when not likely to be detected) theft, sacrilege, and other enormities which we cannot name, might be committed, because nothing was by nature or of itself base, but by law and custom. I shall certainly be allowed to dismiss this school without further hearing, without a more formal proof that moral philosophy, in their hands, was not what our great moral philosophers, from Cicero down to Stewart and Brown of Scotch and American fame, have affirmed, viz. " The guide of life, the standard of virtue, the path to happiness." [102]

      We shall now hear the second school--the Italic. Pythagoras himself, the great Grecian father of the Metempsychosis, and his distinguished pupil, the Locrian Timæus, have opened the mysteries of this line in their leading differential attributes. This school believed in souls, and taught their immortality too. But curious souls they were, and unenviable their immortality. "The Soul Of the world," said they, "is an immortal soul, and human souls are but emanations from it; to which, after some ages of transmigrations, they return and are reabsorbed." This is a miniature of the darling peculiarity of Pythagoreanism. These emanation souls were, by an insuperable necessity, to make the tour of some definite number of human bodies--clean and unclean; and on their return to the anima mundi, to lose their individuality and identity, and to be amalgamated with it. This soul of the world, moreover, was, by the god Necessity, compelled to change worlds. Hence a succession of new worlds and of new transmigrations of the soul of the world was to fill up the series of infinite ages. This was illustrated by a bottle of sea-water, well corked, tossing about in the tumults of the ocean until the cork decayed, or till the bottle dashed upon a rock. In either event its soul, or the water within, mingled with the water of the ocean, and so lost its identity; yet it was as immortal as the ocean, because a part of it. If the illustration was good, the proof was better. This learned lawgiver and philosopher, blessed with a retentive memory, was able to prove his doctrine by narrating his own various and numerous transmigrations, antecedent to the name and body of Pythagoras. His delighted followers heard of his curious and brilliant intrigues and singular freaks while his soul was tabernacling in other mortal tenements.

      If any one can find reasons of morality or of piety, motives to virtue or sources of joy in this school, he must excel the ingenious Ovid himself, who had to amend it in one or two points to suit the licentiousness of his own poetry. If not elegantly, he is correctly translated in the following lines, taken from his fifteenth book:--

But need we ask, How can human souls enjoy or suffer any thing [103] with a reference to the past, having first lost every feeling of personal identity? This school, then, was as ineffectual a guide of life--as whimsical a standard of virtue--as fallacious a way of happiness, as the Eleatic.

      There yet remains another school--the Ionic school, more ancient, and therefore more orthodox, than either of the former two. Thales, its founder, was followed by Anaximander and Anaximenes: these were followed by Anaxagoras, the instructor of Pericles, and Archelaus, the alleged master of Socrates. These all, down to Socrates, devoted themselves to physics and not to morals; therefore they are out of our premises. Not so Socrates: of him Cicero has said, "He was the first to call philosophy from the heavens, to place it in cities, and to introduce it into private houses: that is, to teach public and private morals." He was, indeed, the first and the last of all the Grecian philosophers' that wholly devoted himself to morals.

      Plato and Xenophon were his immediate pupils; Aristotle and Xenocrates theirs. The Ionic school, in its theological and moral departments, was now merged in the Socratic; but that soon branched off into several sects--the Platonic, or old Academic; the Aristotelian, or Peripatetic; the Stoic, founded by Zeno; the middle Academy, by Arcesilaus; and the new Academy, by Carneades. Between these two last Academies there was no real nor permanent difference. If not in all their conclusions, they were, in all their modes of reasoning, skeptical. Their discriminating principles were, that "nothing could be known," and that "every thing was to be disputed;" consequently, nothing was to be assented to, said the absolute skeptic. "No," said the Academics, "the probable, wherever you find it, must be assented to, but, till it be found, you are to doubt." And the misfortune was, they rarely or never found the probable; and in effect the Academics and followers of Pyrrho, the absolute skeptic, were equally atheists all their lives. Meanwhile, as said the learned Bishop of Gloucester, "they talked perpetually of their verisimile and of their probabile, amidst a situation of absolute doubt, darkness and skepticism--like Sancho Panza of his island on the terra firma!" Pyrrho dogmatically affirmed that "no one opinion was more probable than another," and that there were no moral qualities or distinctions. Beauty and deformity, virtue and vice, happiness and misery, had no real cause, but depended on comparison--in one word, that "all was relative."

      The lights of all Pagan philosophy are now reduced to the three sects of the Socratic school--the Platonic, the Peripatetic and the Stoic. If we find no surer, no clearer moral lights in these three, all [104] Grecian, all Roman philosophy is a varied and extended system of skepticism, so far as the origin, moral obligations and destiny of man axe involved.

      The Stoic, (for we shall take the last first,) so called, not from Zeno, their founder, nor from his city; but from the painted porch, in Athens, from which he promulged his doctrines, by another route arrived at the same goal with Epicurus. In their abstractions they discovered, I had almost said, that pain was pleasure; at least, that pain was no evil. Epicurus taught that pleasure was the only good--Zeno, that virtue alone was bliss--Epicurus, that virtue was only valuable as the means of pleasure. Both agreed in demanding from their disciples an absolute command over their passions, and both supposed it practicable. They both boldly asserted that the philosophy which they taught was the only way to happiness; and yet both agreed that there was no future state of happiness or misery, and equally justified self-murder.

      Could any evidence dissipate the delusion of the competency of philosophy to be either the standard of virtue or the guide of life, methinks it might be found in this best of Pagan schools. Amongst its brightest ornaments were Chrysippus, Cato of Utica, Epictetus, Seneca and Marcus Antoninus the Pious. Plausible in many of their dogmata, prepossessing in their displays of certain virtues, fascinating in, some of their theories, most ingenious in all their speculations, they breathed contempt both of pleasure and pain, commanded the extinguishment of passion and appetite, eulogized temperance and self-government, and extolled the dignity of virtue and the rides of modesty and piety; while themselves were addicted to vicious indulgences, sensual pleasures, and even to gross intemperance itself. Zeno drank to excess, and killed himself rather than endure the pain of a broken finger; Chrysippus died of a surfeit of sacrificial wine; Cleanthus followed his example; while Cato of Utica thrust the dagger into his own heart; Epictetus gave to the human will a power almighty, above that of the gods themselves, and advised suicide in certain cases; Seneca taught that no man ought to fear God--that a virtuous man equalled him in happiness; he justified the drunkenness of Cato, and plead for self-murder; while many of them indulged in the grosser and more nameless vices of the Pagan world. Of none of the Stoics could as much in truth be said as. Cowley says of Epicurus:--

      The Peripatetic school, so denominated from the peripaton, or walk of the Lyceum in which Aristotle taught his philosophy, next claims our attention. With the moral part of his theory our demonstration lies. Aristotle, then, with all his prodigious parts, great erudition and various and profound studies, was a polytheist. He asserted the eternity of the world both in matter and form. He, indeed, held a supreme abstract Intelligence, which he called the Supreme God--pretty much the anima mundi of Pythagoras. This Supreme God was the life and soul of all the gods inferior; for all the stars were, with him, true and eternal gods. He denied that Providence ever stooped beneath the moon, and, consequently, superintended not human affairs. His moral sentiments and theories, as a matter of course, corresponded with his theological views. He not only approved but prescribed the exposing and destroying of weak and sickly children. He encouraged revenge. Vacillating in all his theories of the soul, lie doubted at one tune its future existence, and finally concludes the ninth chapter of his third book of Ethics with these words: "Death is the most dreadful of all things; for that is the end of our existence: for to him that is dead there seems nothing further to remain, whether good or evil." Dicæarchus, one of his most learned followers, whom Cicero extols, wrote books to prove that souls are mortal; and many of his followers compared the soul to the harmony of a musical instrument, which has no existence when the instrument is destroyed. The Platonic school, or the old Academic, is not much better than the Peripatetic. Plato is designedly obscure in all his speculations on divinity. He affirms one Supreme God, but he had no concern in the creation or government of the world, and recommended the people to worship a plurality of inferior deities. He extols the oracles, and advises the consultation of them in all matters of religion and worship. He prescribed great licentiousness of manners; allows, and sometimes commands, the exposing and destroying of children. He declares that on proper occasions lying is not only profitable, but lawful. He argues the immortality of the soul, and speaks of the rewards and punishments of a future life. He sometimes, however, equivocates on this subject, and seems to believe in the transmigration of souls; while again he will have the soul immortal from a necessity of nature, or from an antecedent immortality. He taught the Greeks to love themselves and hate the barbarians as enemies; by which term he denoted all other nations.

      But yet there remains Socrates himself, the father of the Greek moral philosophy. Though not followed in the best part of his speculations [106] by even his own Plato, who, nevertheless, with the exception of Xenophon in some points, followed him more closely than any other disciple of the Socratic school, he clearly asserted and boldly taught one God, the immortality of the soul and future retributions. Paradoxical, however, though it be, he did not fully believe the doctrine which he taught. Sometimes he believed it; at other times, his reasonings not fully proving it, he seems to doubt it. He appears, indeed, to have died a skeptic. He both taught and practised polytheism, and amongst his last words ordered a sacrifice to the god of physic.

      As Plato represents him in his Phædon, the more nearly he approached death, the more he doubted his own doctrine. To his surrounding friends he says, "I hope that I shall go to good men after death; but this I will not absolutely affirm." But as to his going to the gods he is positive. "If," says he, "I could affirm any thing concerning matters of such a nature, I would affirm this." Again, "That these things are so, as I have represented them, it does not become any man of understanding to affirm; though, if it appear that the soul is immortal, it seems reasonable to think that either such things, or something like them, are true with regard to our souls and their habitations after death; and that it is worth making a trial, for the trial is noble."

      To his judges he says, "There is much ground to hope that death is good; for it must necessarily be one of the two: either the dead man is nothing, and hath not a sense of any thing, or it is only a change or migration of the soul hence to another place--according to what we are told"--

Finally, he says, "Those who live there are both in other respects happier than we, and also in this, that ever after they are immortal." If the things which are told us are true, Eiper ta legomena aleqe estin. Such are the triumphs of philosophy. Such is its power to guide the life, the piety, the morality, the destiny of man.

      But we are about still further to despoil it of the little light that it has, and divest it of all its glory, even in the points in which the three mightiest of Grecian philosophers-- Socrates, Plato and Aristotle--most deserve and have most enjoyed the admiration of the world.

      Remember the last words of Socrates--"If, indeed, the things that lave been told us are true." Who, then, will have the temerity to affirm that moral philosophy is a true science; that it builds upon its own foundation and uses only its own materials; while its father and [107] founder at last shifts it off the basis of reason and its own researches, and seeks for a foundation in the traditions of former times?

      Tradition, then, and not induction, originated in the minds of the Socratic school all the light of the origin, moral obligations and destiny of man, which this school and the Grecian and the Roman world from it enjoyed.

      The history of the whole matter is this:--The Romans borrowed from the Greeks, the Greeks stole from the Egyptians and Phenicians, while they borrowed from the Chaldeans and Assyrians, who stole from the Abrahamic family all their notions of the spirituality, eternity and unity of God, the primitive state of man, his fall, sacrifice, priests, altars, immortality of the soul, a future state, eternal judgment and the ultimate retribution of all men according to their works.

      We might, indeed, pursue the same course in reference to the Persians, the Egyptians, the Indians, the ancient Gauls, and trace all the light in them to the same common origin.

      The Indians, Egyptians, Phenicians, Greeks, Romans, made very great advances in geometry, astronomy, natural history, philosophy, language, politics, oratory, and the fine arts of architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry and music. But in the points before us they degenerated into superstition, mythology, licentiousness and barbarity.

      As we examine and compare all the systems of moral philosophy and theology, ascending the streams of antiquity we find the Druids among the Gauls, the Magi among the Persians, the Brahmins among the Indians, the philosophers among the Greeks and Romans, all borrowing from one original and universal tradition. The writings of Confucius and Zoroaster, of Borosus and Sanchoniathon, and every ancient monument which has escaped the wreck of time, bear inscribed upon them the same unequivocal testimony.

      Thus the lawgivers, philosophers and sages of Greece travelled into Egypt and the East in quest of knowledge. Amongst the Grecian lawgivers and sages who visited this ancient and celebrated country in search of new ideas, were Orpheus, Rhadamanthus, Minos, Lycaon, Triptolemus, Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, &c.; by whom the Greeks, as generally acknowledged by themselves, imported from Egypt their theology, philosophy and learning.

      Philosophy, or human reason, as may appear in the sequel, is very inadequate to the discovery of ideas on any of the great points involved in the origin, obligations and destiny of man. Hence, sensible and learned men of former times and of the present day assign to tradition or revelation, handed down orally, and neither to "natural religion" [108] nor moral philosophy, all knowledge upon these subjects. Great and learned names may be found in abundance, to sanction the conclusion to which we are forced to come, from the facts now standing in our horizon. These will say, with the distinguished Puffendorf, in his Law of Nations,² "It is very probable that God himself taught the first men the chief heads of natural laws, which were preserved and spread abroad by means of education and custom." "Nature," says Plutarch, in his treatise on Education, "nature without learning or instruction is a blind thing." "Vice can have access to the soul by many parts of the body; but virtue can lay hold of a young man only by his ears." And "Man," says Plato, "if not properly educated, is the wildest and most untractable of all earthly animals." And, declare a host of close observers, " No man has ever been found possessed of a spiritual conception by the mere exercise of his own powers."

      But, to complete our premises, two things are yet wanting--a just view of tradition, and of the comparative claims of reason and faith as faculties or powers of acquiring knowledge of the highest and most important character. On these we have time for but a few remarks. And, first, of tradition as the first and chief source of knowledge to man.

      Before an effort to sketch the history of ancient tradition, we must define the term. According to Milton--a name of high renown--"tradition is any thing delivered orally from age to age." But, in its more enlarged signification, it denotes any thing--fact, event, opinion--handed down to us, whether by word or writing Still, the ancient traditions being accounts of things delivered from mouth to mouth, without written memorials, while speaking of them I shall use the term as defined by Milton--Things delivered orally from age to age.

      Few of us have paid much attention either to the nature or the amount of that knowledge possessed in the remotest ages of the world, or to the safe and direct manner by which it was communicated from one generation to another. It was a true and practical knowledge of those five elements which was essential to the science of happiness. On no one of these points did man, could man, begin to speculate or philosophize till tradition was corrupted by fable, and men began to doubt. Hence the era of philosophy, mental and moral, was the era of skepticism. For, in the name of reason, why should a man institute a demonstration a priori or a posteriori to ascertain a fact for which he had direct, positive and unequivocal evidence? [109]

      That the first man never was an infant, reason and philosophy are compelled to admit; and that he was spoken to before he spoke, and that by a superior Being, are postulates which will be no sooner demanded than conceded by every man having any pretensions to science or reason. Of course, then, the adult Adam received knowledge orally from its fountain--knowledge of his origin, nature, relations, obligations and destiny. If he did not fully comprehend each or all of these, he could not possibly be ignorant of any one of them. He lived for nine hundred and thirty years, an adult life all the time; and certainly was the oracle of the world for the first thousand years of its history.

      But there were two witnesses from the beginning; and two witnesses most credible, because every feeling of human nature compelled Adam and Eve to give a true history of their experience to their own children. Methuselah, who lived to the age of nine hundred and sixty-nine--the very year of the deluge--conversed with Adam for two hundred and forty-three years; and with Shem, the son of Noah, for almost one hundred years. Thus, not only all the experience, all the acquisitions, of these two great and learned sages, (for great and learned they truly were,) but all the science of the antediluvian world was carried down to Shem by the lips of one man. Now, as Shem lived five hundred years after the flood, he must have been the greatest of moral oracles that ever lived. All antiquity, from Adam to himself, came to his ears by one man, corroborated too by the concurrent testimony of many others.

      The amount and variety of knowledge which Methuselah possessed and communicated would, without much reflection, be almost incredible to any one who has not closely looked into the fragments of sacred history which are extant at this hour. Besides, their knowledge of geology, astronomy, natural history, chronology and general physics was much more extensive than we imagine.

      Enoch, the father of Methuselah--the most enlightened and perfect man that lived during the first two thousand years of human history--was a most gifted teacher of the science of morals. He taught a future judgment, the coning of the Lord, with ten thousand of his saints, to punish the wicked; and, in his translation to heaven--body, soul and spirit--forty-four years before Seth, the immediate son of Adam, died, gave an exemplification of the immortality of the saints to all his contemporaries and to posterity through all generations. At the time of his translation, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Methuselah and Lamech were all of mature age and reason; so that all the generations [110] between Adam and Noah had the advantage of the doctrine, manner of life and translation of Enoch. The origin of the universe and of man--his nature, relations, obligations and destiny--were, therefore, matters of fact or direct testimony amongst the antediluvians, and faithfully communicated from the mouth of one individual, corroborated by many concurrent witnesses, into the ears of Shem. Shem, too, became an oracle of the postdiluvians for five hundred years; spending one hundred and fifty years of his life with Abraham, and fifty with Isaac, his son. Thus the entire experience of Adam came to Shem, through one individual, and passed through him to Isaac; so that from the tongue of Methuselah the words of Adam fell upon the ears of Shem, and from the tongue of Shem may have fallen upon the ears of Abraham and Isaac.

      The vast knowledge of ten antediluvian generations, with the subsequent details of four hundred years--a period of two thousand one hundred and fifty-six years--is transferred to Isaac through two persons.

      But, while I thus speak of two persons, I would not be understood as making them the sole depositaries of all the learning and knowledge of twenty generations of men. In keeping the chronicles of the world, Adam was aided eight hundred years by his son Seth; almost seven hundred by his grandson Enos; six hundred by Cainan; five hundred by Mahalaleel; four hundred by Jared; three hundred by Enoch; two hundred by Methuselah; and sixty-four by Lamech, the father of Noah and grandfather of Shem. Shem, also, after the deluge, was aided by ten generations of men with whom he conversed; for, of the twenty generations of our Lord's ancestors whose history he could give, he had seen with his own eyes twelve. How vast and varied, then, were the stores of tradition and of personal experience possessed by this most. learned of all the sages of mankind! A fit person, indeed, in the character of the King of Salem and priest of the Most High God, to bless the patriarch Abraham, the holder of the promises.

      But, to trace the history of tradition down to Moses: Isaac, it will be remembered, lived long enough with Shem to have learned it all from him. He also conversed not only with Jacob, but for more than fifty years with Levi. Levi told the story to his son Kohath; Kohath told it to his son Amram; and Amram to his son Moses. So that all ancient knowledge reached Moses from Adam down to his own times--a period of two thousand four hundred and thirty-three years--by only six persons. [111]

      Meanwhile, the knowledge of the true and only God and of these cardinal points was in Egypt, from other sources of tradition, when Abraham first reached it. Other branches of the human family besides that of Shem took notes of facts and events. And we know that all the knowledge of Shem, communicated to Jacob, Joseph and Levi, went down into Egypt with these persons as early as the year of the world 2298.

      Now, we learn from profane history that Cadmus, with his Phenician colony, founded Thebes, and Cecrops and Danaus, with their Egyptian relations, founded Athens and Argos, about the time of Moses. Carrying with them the science and learning of Egypt into these, new states, we can easily discover how the knowledge of the East came into Europe, and how the traditionary revelation in Abraham's family became a common fountain of knowledge to the whole human race.

      With regard to the correctness and authority of these traditions, moderns generally entertain very erroneous conceptions. We suppose them to be of no higher authority than many of the legendary tales of more modern times. But this is owing to our want of a little philosophy, and to our confounding the character of the traditions after the confusion of speech and the dispersion of mankind with those which existed while the world was all of one language and of one speech.

      Could we place ourselves among the antediluvians while all mankind spoke one language, and then among the postdiluvians after the confusion of speech, the contraction of human life and the wide dispersion of mankind over the earth, we should find some data by which to appreciate the all-important difference between the ancient and the most ancient traditions.

      Can any one, the least acquainted with human nature, possessing a little of the philosophy of himself, imagine that Adam and Eve would not freely communicate to every son and daughter, to the tenth generation, who visited them, all they had orally learned from their Creator, or by subsequent revelation, on the three great questions which human reason and human philosophy frankly confess they cannot answer, viz. What am I? Whence came I? and Whither do I go? Would not the venerable pair most cheerfully and faithfully narrate their experience to their own offspring--give a clear and full record of the past--and intimate all their anticipations of the future? With what thrilling interest would they detail the incidents of the patriarchal state, and the sad series of events accompanying and subsequent to their eventful catastrophe! [112]

      Or can any one suppose that during the latter centuries of this chief patriarch, when his progeny had grown up into nations, multitudes of the most virtuous of them, even from the remotest settlements, would not continually visit him as an oracle, and learn from his own lips the whole history of time, the origin of the race, and the antiquities of nature herself?

      Who of us moderns would not make a pilgrimage half round the globe to see the first man; to look in the face and to hear the voice of the great prototype of humanity; and to listen to his narration, not only of what he had seen and heard of the Creator himself, or learned in latter days of his works and will; but to hear him relate his conceptions and ecstasies when first the breath of life swelled the purple current in his veins--when wonder, love and praise struggled within him for utterance, while he gazed upon the Father of his spirit, and the new-born glories of a universe smiling upon him with brighter beams of joy and bliss than ever the rapt vision of the most inspired of human bards has yet conceived!

      I say, who of us would not have curiosity enough to encounter toils and dangers of the first magnitude, to have it to tell to our children that we had seen and heard the unborn man--the father of a world--the origin of mankind--and his divinely formed wife, an after-creation from himself--the mother of all the loveliness and beauty, of all the grace and excellency, of all the intelligence and taste, of all the delicacy and sensibility which have adorned the untold millions of her deceased and living daughters

      We have only to bring the matter home to ourselves to be assured that the whole history of the first nine centuries, which had in it the elements not only of society, but of religion, morality and all natural science, so far as Adam was concerned, (and no man's experience ever equalled his,) would have been told by him ten thousand times, and as often repeated by his faithful sons and daughters. This would also be true of Shem and of his wife, who stood in a similar relation to the postdiluvian world. They had to tell not only what they had heard from Methuselah, Lamech, and a thousand others of the old world, but had the marvellous record of the deluge, by which a world was lost, and a new order of things begun.

      Now, can there be any thing more obvious than that narrations so often delivered by the same persons, should be engraved upon their memories with the clearness and fidelity of words deep cut in marble, or, engraved on plates of brass? No translations or spurious readings could vitiate or corrupt that text, written on the tablets of hale and [113] undegenerate memories, and kept as within the ark of the covenant, in the sanctum sanctorum of their hearts.

      We need no oracle to declare or to decide, that men walked by faith before philosophy, or that there was no place for speculation or hypothesis during the first two thousand years of time; for who could have been so crazy as to state a hypothesis about the origin or nature, the relations or obligations of man, or about the origin of the universe, while Adam lived! or about the deluge or antediluvian state of our planet, while Noah, Shem or Japheth yet lived! Such a speculator would have been laughed out of society, and excommunicated from the habitations of the sane and rational of mankind.

      Some of the events of the first age of the world were, moreover, of such a nature as to attract extraordinary attention; to occasion more reflection and elicit more light than we can now fully appreciate. The martyrdom of Abel, the death of Adam and the translation of Enoch were of this class. Hence many conversations on the questions, Whither went Enoch? What came of Abel? Why was he slain? Where now is Adam? Of what use is an altar, a priest, a victim? Why count time by weeks? What means the promised seed? What means the threatened bruising of the serpent's head? &c. &c. Among the faithful line of the ancestry of our Lord these were topics familiar and often discussed.

      Hitherto we have spoken of but one line of tradition--that which has given all true light, civilization and refinement to human nature. But there was, and still is, another line, whence came hypothetical philosophy, ignorance and barbarity. Cain was the head of this line. Of him it is said, that after be had slain his brother Abel he went out from the presence of the Lord, or from the dwellings of the righteous, and east of Eden settled in the land of Nod. His line is heard through his descendants, Enoch, Jared, Mehujael, Methusael, Lamech, and his sons Jabal, and Jubal, and Tubal-Cain, seven generations. Cain founded the first city on earth, called after his son, the city of Enoch. Having gone away from the presence of the Lord, and busied himself in worldly employments to drown reflection, and his descendants all following his example, it is not likely that he would often visit the paternal dwelling. The blood of Abel still haunted him, and rendered him in fact a fugitive and vagabond on the earth. His descendants also gave themselves up to animal and temporal pursuits, and became distinguished for their inventions in tent-building, musical instruments, in brazen and iron implements and weapons, and for introducing polygamy and war. [114]

      The destiny of man is never a pleasant theme to such spirits; and as guilt is the natural parent of fear and the immediate progenitor of a refuge of lies and hatred of the light, such persons would be at more pains to vitiate the ancient traditions than to preserve them pure and incorrupt. Intermarrying with these on the part of the other line, superinduced the deluge.

      After that catastrophe, either through the wives of Ham and Japheth, or from the inherited depravity and corruption of the old world, they again apostatized from God. Ham immediately dishonored himself, and brought upon his family a paternal and prophetic malediction. Japheth, too, removed from the residence of his father; and in their wanderings, and subsequently in the confusion and wide dispersion of their offspring, they lost their veneration for the paternal customs and traditions concerning their relations, moral obligations and destiny. Among them the truth began to be mixed up with fable, and so metamorphosed that it lost all its redeeming influence upon these two branches of the family of Noah.

      The posterity of Japheth, called by the Greeks Japetus, comprehended the ancient Cimbrians, Phrygians, Scythians, Medes, Persians, Macedonians, Iberians, Greeks, Romans--indeed, all the ancient European and northern tribes of Asia, and probably some of the American tribes; while the posterity of Ham peopled some portions of Arabia, all Egypt and Canaan, Seba, Shebah, Shinar, much of Africa, and some parts of Asia.

      Among these, fable, mythology and hypothesis began. Oral tradition, much corrupted indeed, continued amongst them till the time of Hesiod, Homer, and, I might say, to the time of Pherecydes of Scyros, the preceptor of Pythagoras--himself the pupil of Pittacus and the oldest of the Greek prose writers. But as the history of the Greeks consisted of oral and incoherent traditions, kept for thirteen, centuries before they had a written history of themselves, little or nothing certain can be known of them, except their original extraction and their plagiarisms on Egypt and the posterity of Shem; for, of all people that ever lived, the Greeks were the greatest literary thieves, and had the best art of concealing the theft.

      The word philosophy, and the profession of philosopher, began with Pythagoras, when tradition was involved in doubt owing to the causes already mentioned--the contraction of human life to seventy or eighty years, the confusion of human speech, the multiplications and wide dispersion of nations, and especially the gigantic iniquity, violence and crime which almost universally prevailed. Polytheism, mythology, [115] hypothesis, skepticism and licentious manners, were the legitimate fruits of departing from the sacred traditions truly and faithfully kept in the line of Seth, Enoch, Noah and Shem, down to Moses, the divine historian and lawgiver of the Jews.

      Thus far the history of the most ancient traditions is placed in contrast with the pretensions of hypothetical philosophy. It remains for us to cast a glance upon two or three points in the human constitution, to ascertain whether man was made to be led by philosophy or tradition in matters pertaining to the science of happiness: for certain it is, if man was not made to be led by philosophy, in vain she pretends to be his guide.

      The question now before us is, How is man constituted as respects the faculty of acquiring knowledge? or with what powers of knowing the universe is he endowed? for, as before observed, the universe must be known before it can be enjoyed. I ask not what are his powers of retaining knowledge, nor what are his powers of applying or of enjoying knowledge; but what are his powers of acquiring it? With the most liberal philosophers they are four--Instinct, Sense, Reason, Faith. Some philosophers, indeed, are not so generous; none, however, give him more; and we are willing that he should appear with all his armor on--with all his intellectual apparatus in full requisition, that we may demonstrate that he was made to be led, pre-eminently and supremely, by a power that despoils speculative philosophy of all its proud assumptions, and gives to tradition, in its broadest and fullest sense, a very elevated standing amongst the sources of intelligence accessible to man.

      Let us then briefly survey these powers. Instinct has never been definitely and satisfactorily explained by any man. The theories on the subject are innumerable, but speculation and inquiry are as rife as ever. Nothing is decided except that it is a law or rule of life conferred by the Creator on every animated existence, animal or vegetable, by which such acts are performed as are essential to its existence and well-being. But it is of a much higher order in the animal than in the vegetable kingdom, and in some animals it appears to be so nearly assimilated and related to intelligence as to be with difficulty distinguished from it. It is, however, very different from sensation and reason; for it is found to exist where there is neither of them.

      In reference to my object, it is enough to say, that by instinct we mean that innate or natural rule of life, which God has written upon and incorporated with the nature of every animal; by which it is enabled to govern itself, in order to the full enjoyment of all its powers [116] and susceptibilities, and so much of the universe as is suited to its nature. So far it is a perfect and infallible rule of life to it, in all that respects its nature and the end of its existence. It may be impaired by physical disease; it may also be deteriorated, but it cannot be improved by education. It is as perfect the first as the last hour of animal or vegetable existence. It gains nothing by experience or observation: hence the swallow builds her nest, the beaver his dam, the bee its cell, and the ant her cities and storehouses, as they were wont to do six thousand years ago.

      Now, man has little or no instinct; and, in this point, is more neglected by his Creator than any other creature; and would, indeed, perish from the earth the first day of his existence, if left to the guidance of all his instinctive powers--an evident proof that he was not made to be led by it, as the law of his animal, intellectual or moral existence.

      By sense we mean those external organs, usually denominated the five senses, through which we become acquainted with the sensible properties of all the objects around us. In this endowment man is not singular. All terrestrial beings of much importance to man have as many senses as he has. And if, in some of his senses, he is superior to some of them, in others, some of them are greatly superior to him.

      But he has intellect--he has reason; and this greatly compensates for those inferiorities; and yet there are many creatures that seem to possess it in some good degree: still it is man's great perfection, by which he rises far above the beasts that perish. Some philosophers have almost deified reason, and given to it a creative and originating power. They have so eulogized the light of reason and the light of nature, that one would imagine reason to be a sun, rather than an eye; a, revelation, rather than the power of apprehending and enjoying it. But when accurately defined, it is only a power bestowed on man, of comparing things, and propositions concerning things, and of deducing propositions from them. It is the faculty of discriminating one name, or thing, or attribute from another, and of forming just conceptions of it. It is not, then, a creative power. It cannot make something out of nothing. It is to the soul what the eye is to the body. It is not light, but the power of perceiving and using it. And as the eye without light, so reason without tradition or revelation would be useless to man in all the great points which the inductive and true philosophy of nature and of fact humbly acknowledges she cannot teach. She modestly avows her inability to unfold, or even to ascertain the origin, nature or end of any thing. Her verdict in the case before us is, that [117] he who presumes to walk by the light of reason in these great matters is not more eminently insane, than he who assumes to walk by his eyes in the midst of utter darkness.

      But the ennobling faculty of man is faith. This puts him in possession of the experience of all other men by believing their testimony. Instinct, sense and reason, however enlarged in their operations, are confined to a single individual of the race, and that within a very narrow circle, a mere atom of creation, and but for a moment of time; while faith encompasses the area of universal experience, and appropriates to its possession the acquisitions of all men in all ages of time.

      Human knowledge, properly so called, consists of but two chapters. Our own individual experience furnishes the one, and faith the other.

      Faith, therefore, is to instinct, sense and reason, as the experience of all mankind is to that of a single individual--the experience of a thousand millions to one. And were we to add to the experience of all living men that of all who have lived and died, or that of all who shall hereafter live, and superadd to this the experience of all angels, and all other orders of intelligences hereafter to be made, accessible s to faith, how inconceivably immense the disproportion between reason and faith, as the means of enlarging the capacity and of storing the mind of man with true knowledge! In one word, then, from an invincible necessity of nature, we are indebted to faith for millions of ideas, for one obtained by our own personal sensations, observations or reflections.

      How preposterous, then, was it for the learned and ingenious author of the "Treatise on Human Nature," to elaborate an essay to prove that no man could rationally believe the testimony of any number of persons affirming a supernatural fact; because, as he imagined, their testimony was contrary to universal experience! The eloquent author of the History of England seems not to have perceived the delusion he was imposing on himself, in making his own individual experience, or that of a few others, equal to that of all mankind in all ages of the world, a ten-thousand-millionth part of which he, nor no other person, ever heard or knew! No man ever bad universal experience, consequently no man could believe it. On such a splendid sophism, on such a magnificent assumption, however, is founded the capacious temple of French, English, German and American infidelity.

      While we have our definitions of instinct, sense, reason and faith before us, and this ingenious class of doubting philosophers in our eye, we must enter another demur to the sanity of their intellects, or of their logic. We have seen that instinct is a divine and infallible rule [118] of life given to the mere animal creation--and, indeed, to the vegetable also, (as might be demonstrated were this the proper place,) for the purpose of guiding the actions of those creatures in benevolent subordination to the end of their being: Now, of this endowment man is of all creatures the most destitute: therefore, if he have not an infallible rule somewhere else, he is more slighted than any other creature; nay, he is the only creature wholly neglected by his Creator, in the most important, too, of all communicated endowments. But he has not this infallible rule in his five senses--he has it not in his powers of reasoning; and unless he have it in his faith in divine testimony, in a revelation internal and external, he is an anomaly in creation--the solitary exception to a law which, but for him, would be universal. But what makes this hypothesis still more extravagantly absurd is the fact, that, of all sublunary creatures, man is the favorite of his Maker--the head and "lord of the fowl and the brute." Now, to have granted the meanest insect a perfect rule of life; to have remembered every other creature and forgotten only man, in a point the most vital to his enjoyment of himself and of the universe, is an assumption, a result more incredible and marvellous than any other assumption on the pages of universal history. This is, indeed, to swallow a camel while straining out a gnat.

      Another assumption of this speculative philosophy, another point deeply affecting the pretensions of revelation, and the most ancient and veritable traditions of the infancy of time and of nations, is equally at fault with the instances now given, and demands a special notice. It objects to a system of religion and morals founded upon faith rather than upon philosophy, as not in harmony with human nature, on account of its liabilities to deception in all matters depending upon human testimony. It dogmatically affirms that man is more liable to be deceived by faith than by reason.

      This is a direct assault upon nature, and consequently upon the Author of it: For what can be more evident than that every human being is by an insuperable necessity compelled to make the very first step in life, intellectual and moral, if not physical, by faith? Must an infant wait the impulses of instinct or the decisions of reason for instruction in what to choose, or what to refuse, in the nursery or infant school? Or must it depend on its own observation, experience and reason, or upon oral tradition, for light upon food, and medicine, and poison? Must it experiment with the asp, the adder, the basilisk, the fire, the flood, the innumerable physical dangers around it, or implicitly believe its nurse, and walk by faith in her traditions? When [119] it enters the infant school, must it prove by reason, or receive upon testimony, the names and figures of all the vowels and consonants of the alphabet? Can it by reason or instinct learn any grammar, speak any language, or make one step in human science or literature? It is just as true in nature as in religion, that he that believeth not shall be destroyed. There is no salvation to the infant man from natural evils--from ignorance, vice and misery--any more than to the adult sinner, from guilt and ruin, but by faith in tradition, oral or written. The voice of nature and that of the gospel speak the same language--he that believeth not shall perish. Man, then, is so constituted that he must walk by faith if he walk at all. He must do this long before reason has commenced its career of examination. Now, to affirm that reason is a better guide than faith, is to charge our Creator with folly in subjecting man to an inferior guide, even in the incipient and moulding period of his being, while his mind is assuming a character, and being fashioned for future life. To do this on a model, too, that forever gives to his ears an ascendency over sense and reason, as the channel of light and knowledge, unless he intended that faith should always have the superiority in guiding the actions of man, is, in fact, to interpose an insuperable obstacle to his own designs, and to defeat himself in any after-measure to restore him to reason, from aberrations supposed to be attendant on the exercise of faith as an incompetent rule of moral action. Man, however, reason as we may, is by an insuperable necessity compelled to make the first step in physical, intellectual and moral life by faith in tradition; and well would it have been for immense multitudes had they continued to walk by faith in the oral traditions of those moral instructors to whom God in the first ages of the world, confided the temporal and eternal destiny of mankind.

      Lest, however, it should seem as if faith and reason were rival claimants for the absolute government of man, and, like other aspirants, were seeking to rise, each upon the ruin of his competitor, to this high office, the province of reason should be distinctly noted and understood. Permit me, then, to say in behalf of reason, that she assumes to be only a minister to faith, as she is to religion and morality. She examines the testimony, and decides upon its pretensions. In this sense, intellect and reason are as necessary to faith as they are to moral excellence; for a creature destitute of reason is alike incapable of faith, morality and religion. Reason, then, in one word, examines the tradition and the testimony, whether it be that of our five senses, our memory, our consciousness, or that of [120] other persons; faith receives that testimony, and common sense walks by it.

      From the definitions, facts and inferences now before us, may we not, gentlemen, conclude that if the physical sciences--natural philosophy in all its branches--be true sciences, because all founded on their own facts, observations and inductions, that science usually called moral philosophy is not a true science, because not founded on its own facts, observations and inductions, but on assumptions and plagiarisms from tradition and divine revelation; borrowing, instead of originating and demonstrating, all its fundamental principles?

      If our mode of examining its pretensions be fair and logical, as we humbly conceive it is, does it not appear, by a liberal induction of witnesses from the best Pagan schools, that it has never taught, with the clearness and fulness of persuasion, nor with the authority of law ox demonstration, the true doctrine of man's origin, nature, relations, obligations and destiny? And from a careful consideration of all our powers of acquiring knowledge, is it not equally evident that he is not furnished with the power of ascertaining any one of these essential points, without the aid of a light above that of reason and nature?

      And may I not further appeal to your good sense, whether we could have instituted and pursued a fairer or more honorable course than to state the pretensions and claims of moral philosophy in her own terms, as used by her greatest and most approved masters-- Grecian, Roman and English; and then inquire singly of all her schools and renowned teachers, whether in their own experience, and in their candid concessions and acknowledgments, philosophy, in life and in death, has redeemed her pledges, fulfilled her promises and' sustained the expectations of her friends and admirers?

      When hard pressed on these points, observing that she herself relied more on tradition than on her own resources, fastening her hopes more on the basis of what was handed down to her by the ancients, than upon all her own discoveries and reasonings, became it not expedient that we also should turn our thoughts to tradition, examine its history and canvass its pretensions, so far at least as to institute a comparison between it and philosophy on the points in discussion?

      Having thus placed these two great sources of intelligence in contract and comparison, and finding on the side of tradition, as defined by us, incontestable and decided advantages, incomparably superior claims and pretensions, what more natural and conclusive than to [121] examine the human constitution, with special reference to these two; and, if possible, to ascertain whether the Creator intended man to walk by hypothetical philosophy or authentic tradition? Such, then, has been our method; and what now, on summing up the whole, are the legitimate results and conclusions?

      Does it not appear that moral philosophy never removed any doubts except those which she had created? Like the spear of Achilles, she healed only the wounds which herself had inflicted. That it cast not a single ray of light upon a single cardinal point in the whole science of happiness! That it failed in all the three great lines of the Ionic, Italic and Eleatic orders; and most essentially failed, even in the best branches of the Ionic school, even in the hands of the great masters--Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Zeno and Epicurus.

      Nay, does it not appear that the age of doubting was the era of philosophy?--that men never began to start hypotheses till they had lost their way?--that mankind walked safely by the light of tradition from a divine origin for many years before philosophy was born?--that those ancient traditions were kept pure for thousands of years in one great line of the human race, but were finally corrupted by priests, and disguised by poets, and thus became the basis of the Chaldean, Indian, Phenician, Egyptian, Persian, Grecian and Roman philosophy?

      And is it not most of all evident, that man is not constituted by his Creator to be led by instinct, sense or reason; but by faith in infallible tradition, in all these points of vital importance in the philosophy of bliss; and that such arrangement is in good keeping with the pre-eminent superiority of the most ennobling of all the endowments of man, whether we consider the immense compass, the infinite variety of its acquisitions, or that high certainty and assurance to which it often rises, and to which we may attain, on all essential points, when accompanied with that candor and inquisitiveness indispensable to the detection of truth, in all matters of vital interest to man?

      My object now is gained, even although I may not have carried conviction to every heart. The science of human happiness is now before us; and if I have not shown where it may be learned, I have certainly shown where it never has been and where it never can be learned.

      And may I now be permitted to add, that the study of these five points opens to the human mind the purest, sweetest and most copious fountains of delight? They connect themselves with the whole universe of God, and place it all under tribute to our happiness. [122]

      With the telescope of faith to our eye, looking back to our origin, beyond the solar system, beyond all the systems of the heavens, we descry the archetype of our being in the remote and unfathomable depths of the bosom and mysterious nature of that divine and transcendent Being whose temple is the Universe, and whose days are all the ages of Eternity.

      While man stands upon this earth and breathes this material breath of life, and sees and feels in his outward frame much in common with the beasts that perish, he feels within himself an unearthly principle an inward man--a heaven-descended mind--a nature more than ethereal--a spirit ever panting, thirsting, longing after the affinity of his Father's spirit, whence, as a spark of intelligence, it was stricken off, and made to illumine its little mansion in the vast temple of creation.

      The intellectual nature vouchsafed to man communes with the Supreme Intelligence in all his various and boundless works; and such is its love of new ideas, of new conceptions of the almighty source of its being and bliss, that if it could only imagine any fixed summit of its attainments, even in the heavens, beyond which it could add no new discoveries, that summit would be the boundary of its career of glory and of bliss; and, repining, as did the Grecian chief, that no new worlds were yet to be conquered, heaven itself would cease to be, the place of infinite delight, the ultimate and eternal home of man.

      The relations of man are, as a necessary consequence, equally sublime and comprehensive with his origin and nature. He touches every point in the universe, whether material or immaterial, animal, intellectual or moral--temporal, spiritual or eternal. He not only derives pleasure from all these sources, but feels that he is related to God, angels and all natures, by ties, and sympathies, and nice dependencies, from which arise innumerable pleasures, duties and obligations; each of which becomes a new source of delight to him who, reconciled to the government of the rightful Sovereign, seeks the enjoyment of all things in subordination to HIS will.

      The destiny of man is in harmony with his nature, relations and origin. True, indeed, there is a dark, cheerless and gloomy mansion, to which his mortality is for a season confined. But should he learn in this life the science of happiness, and regulate his actions according to the philosophy of bliss; beyond that land of darkness and of night, that dreary bourn of his follies, misfortunes and sins, "there is a land of pure delight," a more blissful paradise than that of ancient Eden, in which man will freely eat of the fruit of a more delicious tree [123] of life, breathe a purer air, see a brighter sun, and enjoy, without the intervention of a cloud, the light of that divine and glorious countenance which illumines all the suns of all the systems of universal nature. There, in the midst of kindred spirits of a celestial mould, of a divine temper--the mighty intellects, the refined and cultivated genii of the skies--the true nobility of creation--he will converse, and in the seraphic pleasures of a taste and an imagination of which all terrestrial objects are inadequate types, he will view the bright and more perfect displays of creative power, wisdom and goodness in the palace of the universe; in that holiest of all, where beauty and loveliness in their most divine forms, unseen by mortal eye, shall be displayed in the superlative of glory, amidst the enraptured gratulations of innumerable multitudes of holy spirits, assembled not only from all earthly nations and all mundane ages, but from all the celestial dominions, states and communities of the empire of God.

      To contemplate an eternity past--to anticipate an eternity yet to come--with full-developed minds of celestial stature, dwelling in spiritual and incorruptible bodies of unfading beauty and immortal youth, to survey the past creations of God--to witness the new--to commune with one another, and with all intelligences, on all the manifestations of the divinity--and above all, to trace all the acts of the great drama of man's redemption as developed by the Divine Author and Perfecter of a remedial economy--to read the library of heaven, the volumes of creation, of providence and redemption--to intercommunicate the sentiments and emotions arising from such themes, interrupted only by heavenly anthems, and fresh glories breaking on our enraptured vision--will constitute a proper employment for a being of such endowments, capacities and aspirations as man.

      Need I add, to disclose such secrets--to reveal such mysteries--and to guide man in a path that leads to such a destiny, is not the province of philosophy--of the mere light of nature or of reason; but the peculiar and worthy object of a communication supernatural and divine? and such a volume we have in that much neglected, but incomparably, sublime and awful volume--the BIBLE. [124]

[PLA 95-124]