INCONSISTENCY. How strange and sad is the laxity with which men in these days suffer the most inconsistent opinions to lie jumbled lazily together in their minds,―holding the antimoralism of Paley and the hypophysics of Locke, and yet gravely, and with a mock faith, talking of God as a pure spirit, of passing out of time into eternity, of a peace which passes all understanding, of loving our neighbour as ourselves, and God above all, and so forth!-Blank contradictions!-What are these men's minds but a huge lumberroom of bully, that is, of incompatible notions brought together by a feeling without a sense of connection? HOPE IN HUMANITY. CONSIDER the state of a rich man perfectly Adam Smithed, yet with a naturally good heart;-then suppose him suddenly convinced, vitally convinced, of the truth of the blessed system of hope and confidence in reason and humanity! Contrast his new and old views and reflections, the feelings with which he would begin to receive his rents, and to contemplate his increase of power by wealth, the study to relieve the labour of man from all mere annoy and disgust, the preclusion in his own mind of all cooling down from the experience of individual ingratitude, and his conviction that the true cause of all his disappointments was, that his plans were too narrow, too short, too selfish! Wenn das Elend viel ist auf der Erde, so beruhet der grund davon, nach Abzug des theils erträglichen, theils verbesserlichen, theils eingebildeten Uebels der Naturwelt, ganz allein in den moralischen Handlungen der Menschen.* O my God! What a great, inspiriting, heroic thought! Were only a hundred men to combine even my clearness of conviction of this, with a Clarkson and Bell's perseverance, what might not be done! How awful a duty does not hope become! What a nurse, yea, mother of all other the fairest virtues! We despair of others' goodness, and thence are ourselves bad. O! let me live to show the errors of the most of those who have hitherto attempted this work,—how they have too often put the intellectual and the moral, yea, the moral and the religious, faculties at strife with each other, and how they ought to act with an equal eye to all, to feel that all is involved in the perfection of each! This is the fundamental position. * Although the misery on the earth is great indeed, yet the foundation of it rests, after deduction of the partly bearable, partly removable, and partly imaginary, evil of the natural world, entirely and alone on the moral dealings of men. Ed. SELF-LOVE IN RELIGION. THE unselfishness of self-love in the hopes and fears of religion consists;-first,-in the previous necessity of a moral energy, in order so far to subjugate the sensual, which is indeed and properly the selfish, part of our nature, as to believe in a state after death, on the grounds of the Christian religion:-secondly,-in the abstract and, as it were, unindividual nature of the idea, self, or soul, when conceived apart from our present living body and the world of the senses. In my religious meditations of hope and fear, the reflection that this course of action will purchase heaven for me, for my soul, involves a thought of and for all men who pursue the same course. In worldly blessings, such as those promised in the Old Law, each man might make up to himself his own favourite scheme of happiness. "I will be strictly just, and observe all the laws and ceremonies of my religion, that God may grant me such a woman for my wife, or wealth and honour, with which I will purchase such and such an estate," &c. But the reward of heaven admits no day-dreams; its hopes and its fears are too vast to endure an outline. "I will endeavour to abstain from vice, and force myself to do such and such acts of duty, in order that I may make myself capable of that freedom of moral being, without heaven to me." which heaven would be no Now this very thought tends to annihilate self. For what is a self not distinguished from any other self, but like an individual circle in geometry, uncoloured, and the representative of all other circles. The circle is differenced, indeed, from a triangle or square; so is a virtuous soul from a vicious soul, a soul in bliss from a soul in misery, but no wise distinguished from other souls under the same predicament. That selfishness which includes, of necessity, the selves of all my fellow-creatures, is assuredly a social and generous principle. I speak, as before observed, of the objective or reflex self;-for as to the subjective self, it is merely synonymous with consciousness, and obtains equally whether I think of me or of him;-in both cases it is I thinking. Still, however, I freely admit that there neither is, nor can be, any such self-oblivion in these hopes and fears when practically reflected on, as often takes place in love and acts of loving kindness, and the habit of which constitutes a sweet and loving nature. And this leads me to the third, and most important reflection, namely, that the soul's infinite capacity of pain and of joy, through an infinite duration, does really, on the most high-flying notions of love and justice, make my own soul and the most anxious care for the character of its future fate, an object of emphatic duty. What can be the object of human virtue but the happiness of sentient, still more of moral, beings? But an infinite duration of faculties, infinite in progression, even of one soul, is so vast, so boundless an idea, that we are unable to distinguish it from the idea of the whole race of mankind. If to seek the temporal welfare of all mankind be disinterested virtue, much more must the eternal welfare of my own soul be so;-for the temporal welfare of all mankind is included within a finite space and finite number, and my imagination makes it easy by sympathies and visions of outward resemblance; but myself in eternity, as the object of my contemplation, differs unimaginably from my present self. Do but try to think of yourself in eternal misery !-you will find that you are stricken with horror for it, even as for a third person; conceive it in hazard thereof, and you will feel commiseration for it, and pray for it with an anguish of sympathy very different from the outcry of an immediate self-suffering. Blessed be God! that which makes us capable of vicious self-interestedness, capacitates us also for disinterestedness. That I am ca pable of preferring a smaller advantage of my own to a far greater good of another man,— this, the power of comparing the notions of "him and me" objectively, enables me likewise to prefer-at least furnishes the condition of my preferring a greater good of another to |