if continuing to recognize the nature of duty in things which could then
no longer retain any such quality, otherwise than as looking to the most
immediate and tangible benefit or harm, the lowest of moral calculations,
would be reduced to a vulgar and reptile principle. The best of its
strength, and all its dignity, would be departed from it when it could
refer no more to eternity, an invisible world, and a judgment to come. It
would therefore have none of that emphasis of impression which can
sometimes dismay and quell the most violent passions, as by the mysterious
awe of the presence of a spirit. It would be deprived of that which forms
the chief power of conscience. And it would be impotent in any attempt--if
so absurd an attempt could be dreamed of--to uphold, in the more dignified
character of _principle_, that care of what is right which would be
constantly degenerating into mere policy, and rationally justifying itself
in doing so.

The withdrawment, we said, of the grand truth in question, from a man's
faith, (together with everything of taste and _habit_ which that faith
might have created,) would necessarily break up the government over his
conscience. How evident then is it, that among the people of the heathen
lands, under a disastrous ignorance of this and all the other sublime
truths, that are the most fit to rule an immortal being during his sojourn
on earth, no man could feel any peremptory obligation to be universally
virtuous, or adequate motives to excite an endeavor to approach that high
attainment, even were there not a perfect inability to form the true
conception of it. And then how much of course it was that the general mass
would be dreadfully depraved. Though a momentary surprise may at times
have seized us on the occurrence, in their history, of some monstrous form
of flagitiousness, we do not wonder at beholding a state of the people
such in its general character as the sacred writers exhibit, in
descriptions to which the other records of antiquity add their confirming