AN ADDRESS
_Delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College,
Cambridge, Sunday Evening, July 15, 1838
In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the
breath of life. The grassurst, the meadow is spotted with fire and
gold in the tint of flowers. The air is full of birds, and sweet
with the breath of the pine, the balm-of-Gilead, and the new hay.
Night brings no gloom to the heart with its welcome shade. Through
the transparent darkness the stars pour their almost spiritual rays.
Man under them seems a young child, and his huge globe a toy. The
cool night bathes the world as with a river, and prepares his eyes
again for the crimson dawn. The mystery of nature was never
displayed more happily. The corn and the wine have been freely dealt
to all creatures, and the never-broken silence with which the old
bounty goes forward, has not yielded yet one word of explanation.
One is constrained to respect the perfection of this world, in which
our senses converse. How wide; how rich; what invitation from every
property it gives to every faculty of man! In its fruitful soils; in
its navigable sea; in its mountains of metal and stone; in its
forests of all woods; in its animals; in its chemical ingredients; in
the powers and path of light, heat, attraction, and life, it is well
worth the pith and heart of great men to subdue and enjoy it. The
planters, the mechanics, the inventors, the astronomers, the builders
of cities, and the captains, history delights to honor.
But when the mind opens, and reveals the laws which traverse
the universe, and make things what they are, then shrinks the great
world at once into a mere illustration and fable of this mind. What
am I? and What is? asks the human spirit with a curiosity
new-kindled, but never to be quenched. Behold these outrunning laws,
which our imperfect apprehension can see tend this way and that, but
not come full circle. Behold these infinite relations, so like, so
unlike; many, yet one. I would study, I would know, I would admire
forever. These works of thought have been the entertainments of the
human spirit in all ages.
A more secret, sweet, and overpowering beauty appears to man
when his heart and mind open to the sentiment of virtue. Then he is
instructed in what is above him. He learns that his being is without
bound; that, to the good, to the perfect, he is born, low as he now
lies in evil and weakness. That which he venerates is still his own,
though he has not realized it yet. _He ought_. He knows the sense
of that grand word, though his analysis fails entirely to render
account of it. When in innocency, or when by intellectual
perception, he attains to say, -- `I love the Right; Truth is
beautiful within and without, forevermore. Virtue, I am thine: save
me: use me: thee will I serve, day and night, in great, in small,
that I may be not virtuous, but virtue;then is the end of the
creation answered, and God is well pleased.
The sentiment of virtue is a reverence and delight in the
presence of certain divine laws. It perceives that this homely game
of life we play, covers, under what seem foolish details, principles
that astonish. The child amidst his baubles, is learning the action
of light, motion, gravity, muscular force; and in the game of human
life, love, fear, justice, appetite, man, and God, interact. These
laws refuse to be adequately stated. They will not be written out on
paper, or spoken by the tongue. They elude our persevering thought;
yet we read them hourly in each other's faces, in each other's
actions, in our own remorse. The moral traits which are all globed
into every virtuous act and thought, -- in speech, we must sever, and
describe or suggest by painful enumeration of many particulars. Yet,
as this sentiment is the essence of all religion, let me guide your
eye to the precise objects of the sentiment, by an enumeration of
some of those classes of facts in which this element is conspicuous.
The intuition of the moral sentiment is an insight of the
perfection of the laws of the soul. These laws execute themselves.
They are out of time, out of space, and not subject to circumstance.
Thus; in the soul of man there is a justice whose retributions are
instant and entire. He who does a good deed, is instantly ennobled.
He who does a mean deed, is by the action itself contracted. He who
puts off impurity, thereby puts on purity. If a man is at heart
just, then in so far is he God; the safety of God, the immortality of
God, the majesty of God do enter into that man with justice. If a
man dissemble, deceive, he deceives himself, and goes out of
acquaintance with his own being. A man in the view of absolute
goodness, adores, with total humility. Every step so downward, is a
step upward. The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.
See how this rapid intrinsic energy worketh everywhere,
righting wrongs, correcting appearances, and bringing up facts to a
harmony with thoughts. Its operation in life, though slow to the
senses, is, at last, as sure as in the soul. By it, a man is made
the Providence to himself, dispensing good to his goodness, and evil
to his sin. Character is always known. Thefts never enrich; alms
never impoverish; murder will speak out of stone walls. The least
admixture of a lie, -- for example, the taint of vanity, the least
attempt to make a good impression, a favorable appearance, -- will
instantly vitiate the effect. But speak the truth, and all nature
and all spirits help you with unexpected furtherance. Speak the
truth, and all things alive or brute are vouchers, and the very roots
of the grass underground there, do seem to stir and move to bear you
witness. See again the perfection of the Law as it applies itself to
the affections, and becomes the law of society. As we are, so we
associate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by
affinity, the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into
heaven, into hell.
These facts have always suggested to man the sublime creed,
that the world is not the product of manifold power, but of one will,
of one mind; and that one mind is everywhere active, in each ray of
the star, in each wavelet of the pool; and whatever opposes that
will, is everywhere balked and baffled, because things are made so,
and not otherwise. Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not
absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil
is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So
much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things
proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love,
justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean
receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All
things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with
it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength
of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves
himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote
channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute
badness is absolute death.
The perception of this law of laws awakens in the mind a
sentiment which we call the religious sentiment, and which makes our
highest happiness. Wonderful is its power to charm and to command.
It is a mountain air. It is the embalmer of the world. It is myrrh
and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the
hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. By it, is the
universe made safe and habitable, not by science or power. Thought
may work cold and intransitive in things, and find no end or unity;
but the dawn of the sentiment of virtue on the heart, gives and is
the assurance that Law is sovereign over all natures; and the worlds,
time, space, eternity, do seem to break out into joy.
This sentiment is divine and deifying. It is the beatitude of
man. It makes him illimitable. Through it, the soul first knows
itself. It corrects the capital mistake of the infant man, who seeks
to be great by following the great, and hopes to derive advantages
_from another_, -- by showing the fountain of all good to be in
himself, and that he, equally with every man, is an inlet into the
deeps of Reason. When he says, "I ought;" when love warms him; when
he chooses, warned from on ...
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