testimony and ample illustrations. For while the immense aggregate is
displayed to the mental view, as pervaded, agitated, and stimulated, by
the restless forces of appetites and passions, and those forces operating
with an impulse no less perverted than strong, let it be asked what kinds
and measure of restraint there could be upon such a world of creatures so
actuated, to keep them from rushing in all ways into evil. Conceive, if
you can, the fiction of such a multitude, so actuated, having been placed
under an adjustment of restraints competent to withhold them. And then
take off, in your imagination, one after another of these, to see what
will follow. Take off, at last, all the coercion that can be applied
through the belief of a judgment to come, and a future state of
retribution;--by doing which you would also empower the race to defy, if
any recognition of him remained, the Supreme Governor, whose possible
inflictions, being confined to the present life, might at any time be
escaped by shortening it. All these sacred bonds being thus dissolved,
behold this countless multitude abandoned to be carried or driven the
whole length to which the impulses of their appetites and passions would
go,--or could go before they were arrested by some obstruction opposed to
them from a quarter foreign to conscience. And the main and final thing in
reserve to limit their career, after all the worthier restraints were
annihilated, would be only this,--the resistance which men's self-interest
opposes to one another's bad inclinations. A gloomy and humiliating
spectacle truly it is, to be offered by a world of rational and moral
agents, if we see that, instead of a repression of the propensity to
wickedness by reverence of the Sovereign Judge, and the anticipation of a
future life, there is merely a restraint put on its external activity, and
that by the force of men's fears of one another. But nearly to this it
was, as the only strong restraint, that those heathens were left by their
ignorance, or a notion so slight as to be little better, of a future
existence and judgment.