It will be perceived from the historical survey in this and the previous chapter, that—as was said at the outset—all ethical systems resolve themselves into the two classes of which the Epicureans and the Stoics furnished the pristine types,—those which make virtue an accident, a variable, subject to authority, occasion, or circumstance; and [pg 220] those which endow it with an intrinsic right, immutableness, validity, and supremacy. On subjects of fundamental moment, opinion is of prime importance. Conduct results from feeling, and feeling from opinion. We would have the youth, from the very earliest period of his moral agency, grounded in the belief that right and wrong are immutable,—that they have no localities, no meridians,—that, with a change of surroundings, their conditions and laws vary as little as do those of planetary or stellar motion. Let him feel that right and wrong are not the mere dicta of human teaching, nay, are not created even by revelation; but let their immutable distinction express itself to his consciousness in those sublime words which belong to it, as personified in holy writ, “Jehovah possessed me from the beginning of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or ever the earth was. When He prepared the heavens, I was there. When He appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by Him.” This conception of the Divine and everlasting sacredness of virtue, is a perennial fountain of strength. He who has this does not imagine that he has power over the Right, can sway it by his choice, or vary its standard by his action; but it overmasters him, and, by subduing, frees him, fills and energizes his whole being, ennobles all his powers, exalts and hallows all his affections, makes him a priest to God, and a king among men.
Index.
Abstinence, when to be preferred to temperance, [175]
Academy, the New, [205]
Action, defined, [1]
springs of, [10]
governing principles of, [30]
Affections, the, [22]