scribed; and in that case the state will sanction many alleged rights founded on injustice. As the state advances in moral culture, it will perceive the arbitrary and wrongful origin of titles, distinctions, and immunities thus founded, and will aim gradually to remedy the inequalities established by ancient prescription and usage. But it cannot do this suddenly, or except stepwise and by prospective legislation; for what was arbitrary at the outset may have become relatively right by the historical sanction of long consent and habit; and the hasty reversion of historical precedents, the righting, in paroxysms of strong moral feeling, of wrongs established by immemorial prescription, would break up the continuity of a state, destroy its identity, unhinge the confidence of its citizens, and unsettle the mutual understandings on which they had been wont to base their contracts and their enterprises. Law, therefore, in a well constituted community, will always, in its progress, keep somewhat in the rear of the national conception of justice. "Law, who must constantly travel on towards justice, must always have some part of her journey yet to perform." But on this intervening ground some crushingly hard individual cases may arise, — cases for which the law in its present condition provides no remedy, but which the sense of justice in the community will not suffer to remain unremedied. This space is covered by equity jurisdiction, which exists in some form in every enlightened community, and which always marks the next steps which law will take in its progress onward towards the supreme rule of right. As man's moral nature developes itself in the lapse of time, the conception of humanity, as a principle requiring each individual to own in others the same rights which he claims for himself, acquires definiteness, consistency, and universality. Humanity points constantly to an equality of civil rights, and thus to the emancipation and enfranchisement of whatever classes of men, as serfs or slaves, may have been interdicted from the free exercise of some or all of these rights. The laws of a state, with their retributive sanctions, are among the chief means of establishing, and may be highly instrumental in elevating, the national standard of morality. It is not their only function to command or forbid express acts; but they perform a most important part in the moral education of the people. They impress certain characteristics of good and of evil on the acts which they VOL. LXIII. - No. 132.

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command, permit, and forbid. By their scale of punishments, they graduate the guilt of different crimes, and thus affect the relative estimate in which different vices and their opposite virtues are held by the great body of the people, who never become criminally amenable to the laws. This teaching of the laws combines with the moral education which children receive from their parents and instructers, and with that which results from the self-culture of individuals more advanced in life; so that laws which there is seldom occasion to execute may exert an incalculable influence in creating and sustaining the state of general sentiment which makes them seem otiant and superfluous.

We would here pause and ask, whether this last consideration has the weight which it deserves in the proceedings of legislative bodies, and in the discussions designed to influence them. Humane and philanthropic reformers are constantly demanding a mitigation of legal penalties, on the plea, that such mitigation, especially if the administration of justice be rendered sure and prompt, will still leave punishments sufficiently severe to exercise a salutary restraint upon evildoers. They maintain a perpetual protest against punishments more severe than are absolutely necessary for the prevention of crime. We agree with them that punishments should be limited by this essential end. But it is not the vicious portion of the community that is chiefly affected by them. Depraved men are too much under the influence of their passions, to calculate coolly the chances or the degrees of penalty which they are going to incur. Most great crimes are committed under the impulse of overmastering desires or enmities, which render the malefactor reckless of consequences. The prevention of crime is an end much more likely to be attained among those who have their characters yet to form, and who will grow into the tone of feeling which pervades the statute book. When in England the killing of a man might be atoned for by a fine, while the knocking down of a deer by an unqualified person was a capital offence, multitudes of youth grew up with a much more sacred reverence for the royal forests than for human life, and the stain of "blood-guiltiness" was regarded by the whole community as slight and transient. In our own country, fraudulent bankruptcy and some of the more genteel forms of swindling are looked upon with a leniency of judgment which is train

ing young men in all our commereial cities for lives of dishonesty; and this mainly because the law has failed to set its penal brand of reprobation upon these practices. On the other hand, there are forms of impurity and unnatural vice, that used to be unblushingly practised and gloried in before the Christian era, but which have almost died out of Christendom, not because few reach the depth of depravity which renders these crimes possible, but because the severest penalties stand written against them in the statute books of every civilized nation. The judicious philanthropist will wish not for mild, but for just punishments. He will desire to see the moral scale as distinctly recognized in the penalties which society inflicts on the guilty, as it is in the instructions of the Christian family or pulpit; and will be contented that those crimes which imply an abnegation of common humanity should be visited (whether by death or by hopeless imprisonment) with the perpetual excision of the offending member from the body politic.

It was conclusively shown in our January number, that capital punishment is neither necessary for the prevention of the last steps of crime, nor effectual in the prevention of the crimes to which it is attached. The question remains, whether it may not be needed for the moral education of the community at large, in order to sustain a general and profound sense of the sacredness of human life, and of that purity in the weaker sex, which is to be regarded as dearer than life. And we say unhesitatingly, that, if imprisonment nominally for life is to continue what it now is in our country, a brief restraint, almost sure to be terminated by the irresponsible and ill-judged clemency of the executive, or, yet worse, to be bought off by money or by votes, we cannot afford to have the death-penalty removed. This sham imprisonment does not brand with sufficient ignominy those outrageous crimes which ought to be held in universal detestation. But could certain classes of criminals be made civilly dead, beyond the possibility of restoration except by new evidence casting doubt upon their guilt, we will then grant that the community may give added sanction to the sacredness of human life by forbidding its violation even by the stern hand of public justice.

But to return to our author. We have followed him so far as morality can go without new light and added sanctions

from a higher source of authority. Man's intuitive moral conceptions cannot but identify duty with happiness. But the connection is often apparently interrupted, and at best but dimly traced. Expediency and right often seem to point to divergent paths; and the temptation is strong, and frequently irresistible, to pursue happiness in opposition to the dictates of moral principle. Here morality seeks the aid of religion. The idea of God becomes unfolded and fixed, in the course of man's intellectual and moral progress. The evidences of design in the outward creation, the structure and powers of the human soul lead irresistibly to the belief of a supreme First Cause. The harmonious course of nature points to an unceasing Providence. The creature cannot but feel himself the subject, and thus learns to regard the moral law, as enacted by the universal Creator and Governor. The system and course of nature also abound with traces of a benevolent purpose, and indicate the happiness of his creatures as the will of the Creator. Here, then, is found the desired thread that connects duty and happiness. If the moral law is the law of God, it must be a law of supreme benevolence, and obedience to it cannot fail in every instance to promote human happiness; and if this end cannot always be traced in the present life, there are numerous analogies that point to a future state of being in which it may be fully attained.

These ideas of natural religion, when established, prepare the way for the reception of revealed religion; and in the history of the world we find a series of well authenticated revelations, of which the central, or rather the culminating, point is the advent of Jesus Christ. His teachings expound the supreme law of duty, sanction it by promises extending into the boundless future, establish the identity of duty and happiness, and prescribe new means and offer new aids for man's moral progress. Taking the divine origin of Christianity for granted, Dr. Whewell brings together the precepts of our Saviour and his Apostles with reference to the several classes of duties previously discussed; and the chapters devoted to this synopsis consist of the express words of Scripture, with only here and there a connecting or explanatory sentence.

obligations of natural of duties, of which

But religion not only sanctions the morality; it prescribes a new class God is the object and the centre, duties of reverence,

worship, praise, and prayer. Nay, more, it makes God the object of all other duties, and prescribes their performance as an essential portion of the homage which we owe to him. As religious truth is simply an outline of the actual relations of moral beings to each other and their Creator, of course religious belief is essential to the full moral culture of each individual, and without it, he must omit the discharge of many positive and essential duties. To religious unbelief or error, then, are applicable the same principles which were laid down as to ignorance or error with regard to the moral law. Unbelief, in consequence of the lack of suitable religious teaching, is a misfortune as regards the moral nature, arresting its progress at a very low point, if not inverting it; while unbelief, with ample means of ascertaining the truth, is necessarily blameworthy. Religious belief being thus essential to man's moral progress and well-being, there results the duty of Christian edification, or mutual religious improvement, which suggests a system of social means for the acknowledgment, the preservation, and the diffusion of religious truth, for the initiation of the young and ignorant, and for the embodiment of Christian ideas in men's social relations and intercourse. That these supremely important ends may be adequately answered, they must not be left to the random and fickle impulses of irresponsible individuals; but they demand an established system of means. Such means are Christian ordinances. Our author enumerates four sources of rules for Christian ordinances; namely, Natural Piety, Early Revelation, Apostolic Institution, and Catholic Tradition.

These sources we readily admit, with a qualification, to which he would undoubtedly assent, by which we would assign to early revelation and Catholic tradition the mere office of interpreting and authenticating apostolic institution. Thus, for instance, we would defend infant baptism, not on the mere ground that the circumcision of infants was practised under the Jewish revelation, and that the baptism of infants comes down to us sanctioned by the unvarying practice of the early church, but because these facts render it morally certain that infants were included in the apostolic institution. In addition to these sources, the right is claimed for each national church of regulating the forms and details of ordinances, where they are not specially prescribed, — a right which none will question where a national church exists.