rebels: it subsists evermore, because it is the work of the Almighty.
Humanity, in its strange destiny, has never ceased to outrage the rule
which it acknowledges, and to pronounce upon its own acts a ceaseless
condemnation. The laws which are investigated by the physical sciences
are the plan of the Creator realized in nature: the law proposed to
liberty is the plan of the Creator to be realized by the community of
minds. Such is the explanation of the conscience: God is its solid
foundation.

Duty and God, morality and religion, are inseparable principles; all the
efforts of a false philosophy have never succeeded, and never will
succeed, in disjoining them. Men will never be prevented from believing
that God is holy, and that His will is binding upon them: they will
never be prevented from believing that holiness is divine, and that the
will of God reveals itself in the admonitions of the conscience.
Therefore the progress of religion and the progress of morality are
closely united; the morality of a people depends above all on the idea
which it forms to itself of God. The conscience, in fact, at the same
time that it is real and permanent in its bases, is variable in the
degrees of its light. It is enlightened or obscured, according as the
man's religious conceptions are pure or corrupted; and, on the other
hand, when the religious worship is degraded beyond a certain limit by
error and the passions, the conscience protests, and by its protest
purifies the religious conceptions. It has often been said, that in the
onward march of humanity, morality is separated from faith, and comes at
last to rest upon its own bases. It is a notion of the eighteenth
century, which, although its root has been cut, is still throwing out
shoots in our time. The attempt has been made to support this theory by
the great name of Socrates. It is affirmed that the sage of Athens,
breaking the bond which connects the earth with heaven, separated duty