better world. The mass of suffering incident to ignorance and the consequent neglect of the natural laws is incalculable; plague, epidemic, disease, melancholy, madness, poverty; and these continue to be represented by some of our religious teachers, not as the consequence of our ignorance and transgression of laws with which we ought to be acquainted, but as a necessary part of human nature, consequent upon the transgression of Adam; inflicted as arbitrary chastisements or trials by God, to be removed only by Him in the same arbitrary manner, prayer being the only proper way to effect their removal. Whereas were they removed by prayer without our first having our attention called to their cause and removing it, it would probably be to our destruction and not our good.

It is our moral duty then to study the nature of everything around us, and to make ourselves acquainted with the particular constitution it has received from the hand of the Creator, and its relation to our own organization, for whether it will do us good or harm depends upon the adaptation of our conduct to such properties and relations.

It is the province of Moral Science to teach us what our duties are, and of Social Science to place us in circumstances that will best enable us to perform them. Perhaps the most direct means of ascertaining what our duties are,—that is, what are

the purposes for which we have been made, is to study the faculties and attributes with which we have been endowed, and thus basing our moral code upon the use of each in the direction for which its nature shows it was evidently intended. I have endeavoured to work out this principle in my "Education of the Feelings and Affections," which will make it unnecessary to pursue the subject at any length here. Morality ought to be at least as certain a science as Chemistry or Medicine; Moralist ought to be able to speak as certainly as the Chemist or Physician each in his department, of what a person with a definité mental constitution ought to do, and in what circumstances he ought to be placed to make him as happy as possible.*

a

As I have said, my object here is the elucidation of Principles, but I may just mention two or three things in the practice of Morality, that are calculated to work the greatest change for the better in the present state of society, when they come to be clearly recognized as duties. Now they are either overlooked or completely ignored. Thus, no man will consider it right, either with a license or without, to bring children into the world for which he has not a moral certainty of providing properly without the assistance of others. Surely it would be wrong to bring children into the world that we knew would die of starvation; is it not

* The bearing of this subject on the Mental Constitution is treated by the Author in his "Science of Man" (Longmans).

also wrong to bring them into the world with the certainty that their support must depend upon other people, either in an exacted poor's rate or any

other way? When a provident person has economised his time and done his work it is quite unjust that he should be set to work again to help to keep a dozen children for another man whose own earnings have never been properly equal to the support of one. Strange as it may seem, the opposite feeling to this almost universally prevails, and prizes are given to agricultural labourers for having families of 12 or 16 children upon twelve shillings a week. Any improvement in the condition of the Working Classes must be based on provident habits; and all providence, to be effectual, must commence here.

Again, it will not much longer be considered right and fair that when the Capitalist and a hundred Labourers shall work together an equal number of hours with a common object, the Capitalist shall carry off so large a share of the common produce, merely because the present working of the law of supply and demand gives him power to do so. Attention to the "moral check' on population, mentioned above, will stop this abuse and enable the workman by lessening his numbers to make a better bargain for himself.

A more equal and just division of the produce of labour will be a check on the present luxurious mode of living, which is the scandal of the present

age; and the upper and middle classes will be obliged to return to nature's more simple pleasures, which are higher, purer, more lasting, and which distinguish man peculiarly as man. Pure air, exercise, healthy appetite, the pursuit of truth, the poetry of nature in beautiful scenery, change of season, the blue sky and clouds and sunsets, the hum and buzz and quietude of enjoyment of insect and animal life, books and the company through them of all the great and good that have departed, how cheap are these, yet how lasting!

It is often thought that vice would be pleasant enough in this world if it were not for the penalties that attend it in another; but this is a great mistake, for every deviation from the moral laws is attended with suffering as certainly, although not so directly and immediately, as in the physical or organic laws, and a person guilty of an immorality will be as surely punished for it as if he were to put his hand into the fire. The instances given above are certainly breaches of the moral law, although, as I have said, not generally recognized and acknowledged, and very much of what is called "evil" in the world is consequent upon them and may be removed upon the removal of the cause. Mankind are scrambling to get all the good they can for themselves individually, and they miss in consequence the higher good to be attained only by arrangements made best to promote the happiness of all. The mysteries of God's Moral Providence

First, to the non-recognition that all God's laws, physical, moral, and mental, are equally binding upon us.

Second, we compare our condition with that of other people, both real and imaginary, and we consider ourselves entitled to something better than the state and position in which we find ourselves; whereas, if we carry out the doctrine of Necessity to its legitimate consequences, we are really entitled to nothing save a balance of enjoyment, since all our merit is derived.

Third, we have looked upon ourselves as individuals, and have acted too much without reference to the whole, of which we are only a very small part. But what is man, looked at through the doctrine of Philosophical Necessity? A mere link in the chain of causation, connected with innumerable links before his existence, and with the future chain ad infinitum, the consequences of his existence being endless; calling, probably, numberless beings into existence by the same necessary law by which he himself began to be. A mere atom in the mass of sensitive creation, called into existence without any choice on his part, and moved by influences over which he has no more control than an atom of matter over attraction or repulsion, or whatever other laws it may be constituted to obey. He, an atom of the great body of mankind, bearing the same relation to it as a single