Degeneracy of public morals must always necessarily follow corruption of public principles. As soon might you expect to draw pure water from a polluted fountain, as virtuous actions from unsound principles. Remove the restraint of conscience, and what does man become? a fickle and wicked being, of wild passions, selfish feelings, and ungovernable appetites: he has lost the ruling principle which regulated and directed his actions; and thus resembles a boat without rudder or oars, tost upon a stormy sea, which, impelled in different directions as the winds, tides, or currents happen to prevail, possesses neither certainty of direction nor steadiness of course.
It is true, when the law of God ceases to be the rule of right, men profess to substitute for it the law of honour and the law of the land. But to ascertain the value of the law of honour as the guide of life, let some of the cases of daily occurrence be observed, in which the rights of hospitality have been abused with shameless unconcern, the confidence of friendship repaid with base ingratitude, and the dearest ties of life broken with base and heartless exultation, by men of honour. Words cannot express the load of deep, of agonizing woe, which the partial substitution of the law of honour for the law of God has inflicted upon this Christian land. Families, through it, have had to suffer privations from the extravagance, and poverty from the gambling of parents; to weep for the untimely death of a father by the hand of the duellist; to mourn and blush for the indelible stain of a mother’s shame.
Such are some of the terrible effects of the law of honour, as the guide of life, which, if it sanction not, tolerates the betrayal of innocence, the ruin of a family, and the murder of a fellow-creature.
Let an inquiry be now made into the value of the law of the land as a rule of right. Here the records of our courts of justice might suffice to shew, that severe laws do not deter from the commission of crime. This is as might be fairly calculated upon; because the fear of uncertain or distant punishment, will never operate as an effectual restraint upon an unprincipled mind: it is not, that the law is without its terrors to offenders, but it is, that under the influence of some powerful inducement, the salutary effect of those terrors is lost, from their being viewed at a distance, from the hope of escaping detection, and from the power of present temptation. These observations regard principally more heinous offences; but if the effect of the criminal code be found to be, that it operates more for the punishment than the prevention of crime, what would be the state of society, if the civil law was our great guide in transactions between man and man.
If careful only to keep within its enactments, we made inclination or interest our guide, where would be all the kind offices of Christian charity, where the interchange of friendly services, where the joys of Christian sympathy. Sad, indeed, would be the change, if, making the law of the land his sole rule of right, man, naturally weak, selfish, and sensual, gave the reins to his desires, and sought only his personal gratifications. There might, indeed, be some exceptions, but the general rule would be, “let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.” In illustration of this view of the probable effects of such a system upon society, let the case of a litigious man be supposed: what annoyance, what ill-will, what animosities, does his vexatious enforcement of the law, in the most minute particulars, often excite in a neighbourhood: but if, in addition to his being litigious, he be also irreligious,—if he be without a belief in a future state, a judgment to come, and final rewards or punishments—what a fearful aggravation of the evils at once takes place: suppose, however, further, that it is not the spirit, but the letter of the law he regards; nay, more, that it is only its punishments he fears; and that he breaks the law, whenever secrecy affords hope of escape, or the weakness of the party injured, chance of impunity: what a pest to society would he be!—And yet, however odious and disgusting the picture, such would the great bulk of mankind become, if they could be once brought to consider conscience a bug-bear, and Christianity an imposture.
What is it restrains appetites, the indulgence of which produces so much misery?—Christianity. What is it subdues the desire of revenge, which thirsts for blood?—Christianity. What is it arrests the course of secret crime?—Christianity. What is it expands the contracted views and wishes of selfishness, and unlocks the sympathies of cold uncharitableness?—Christianity. Have the law of honour, or the law of the land, power to produce such mighty effects? They even lay not claim to such a power. But the benefits of Christianity stop not here. It is true, its transforming power, when its hallowing influence is fully felt, is the grandest phenomenon of the moral world:—“the wicked are like the troubled sea, when it cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt:” [123] but above the storm, a voice is heard—the command is uttered,—“Peace, be still!” the winds of passion are hushed, the waves of appetite subside, and a holy calm reigns in the mind and heart. Still, the power of Christianity, heaven’s best gift to man, produces other benefits. It heals all the wounds which physical and moral evils cause to poor human nature. It soothes the pain of sickness, it lightens the pressure of privation, it cheers the sorrows of affliction; and, at that awful hour, when human aid is unavailing, and when the soul, trembling on the brink of eternity, can repose only on the firm stay of eternal truth, it administers solid comfort, supplies pious confidence, and whispers holy peace.—A dying hour is a severe test of principles; and it is at that hour, which unmasks hypocrisy, and proves the weakness of philosophy, the power of genuine Christianity is clearly seen:—it is at that hour, when all the world seeks for as happiness, is found to be vanity, all it calls glory, fades into insignificance, its value is fully felt; it is at that hour, when a recollection of past sins, long forsaken and repented of, is present to the humble and contrite, and a consciousness of extreme unworthiness afflicts the soul which still confides in Jesus, its victory is complete.
Well might Bishop Watson ask Gibbon, “Suppose the mighty work accomplished, the cross trampled upon, Christianity every where proscribed, and the religion of nature once more become the religion of Europe; what advantage will you have derived to your country or to yourselves from the exchange?—I will tell you from what you will have freed the world; you will have freed it from its abhorrence of vice, and from every powerful incentive to virtue; you will, with the religion, have brought back the depraved morality of Paganism: you will have robbed mankind of their firm assurance of another life; and thereby you will have despoiled them of their patience, of their humility, of their charity, of their chastity, of all those mild and silent virtues which, (however despicable they may appear in your eyes) are the only ones which meliorate and sublime our nature; which Paganism never knew, which spring from Christianity alone.” [124] Nor does this able writer, in his Letters to Paine, state less clearly and forcibly the evils which the infidel school inflict upon society. “In accomplishing your purpose you will have unsettled the faith of thousands; rooted from the minds of the unhappy virtuous all their comfortable assurance of a future recompense; have annihilated, in the minds of the flagitious, all their fears of future punishment; you will have given the reins to the domination of every passion; and have thereby contributed to the introduction of the public insecurity, and the private unhappiness usually, and almost necessarily, accompanying a state of corrupted morals.” [125]
Would that the anti-christian school of this day could be induced to forego their unwearied exertions to make proselytes, by considering the poor substitute they have to offer for an holy faith, which is the hope of the prosperous, the consolation of the afflicted, the comfort of the sick, and the support of the dying! To man, who feels his want of some holy light to guide his erring steps, some blessed solace to cheer an aching heart, in a world of perplexity and woe, the infidel has nothing to offer but the laws, for the guidance of his public conduct, and for his internal monitor and comforter,—a poor philosophy. But what to teach him how to die? Nothing: for he has nothing to offer but the trite aphorisms of heathen philosophers. What to take away the fear of something after death? Nothing: for he who believes nothing which Christianity has revealed can know nothing of a state of future existence, uncognizable by unassisted reason.
Miserable men! the Christian mourns over the wilful blindness which, in the full blaze of the meridian sun, continues in darkness, a state which is but a faint emblem of “the blackness of darkness for ever.” Most guilty men! the Christian burns with holy indignation against their perverted and wicked zeal for proselytism, of whom it may be said, “Ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.” [126] If the infidel reflects, what must be his state of mind, when he remembers, how often, whilst feeling the utter wretchedness of his dark and cheerless creed, he has sought with artful sophistry to bewilder the understandings of the ignorant, and, with cold heartlessness, to blast the hopes of the virtuous! He who openly stabs or secretly poisons an associate, incurs a less load of moral guilt than he who inflicts a wound or instils a poison, which, rankling, causes misery in this life, and in the next, anguish unutterable and interminable.
Fatal, however, as such a creed must be to the best interests of society, wherever its influence prevails, it assumes a still more alarming aspect as inculcated by those infidel teachers, who, disseminating their pestilent doctrines amongst our working population, not only seek to destroy all the hopes and fears of an hereafter, but to stimulate their evil passions, and to produce a contempt not less for human than Divine laws. If once principles so subversive of the civil and religious obligations of man, as a member of a Christian community, were allowed gradually to leaven the great mass of the population; not only would the cause of religion and morals be deeply injured, but eventually the altars of God would be overthrown, the bonds of civil society broken, and anarchy, spoliation, and bloodshed, reign through the land. With the great bulk of mankind, the sense of responsibility, present and future, is the great restraint upon their evil inclinations. Philosophers may talk of the eternal fitness of things, the beauty of virtue, the value of the distinctions of rank, of unequal divisions of property, and the necessity of order, subordination, and industry, for the well-being of society: but once remove from the minds of the lower classes their fear of punishment,—by destroying all belief in a future state of retribution, and all dread of the laws of the land, the execution of which they overawe, defeat, or defy, by their numbers,—and there will be confusion, aggression, outrage, and a general attack upon property. Constituted as man is by nature, and constituted as society is by law and custom, in a Christian country, as soon as Revelation is rejected by the great bulk of the people, the work of disorder and disorganization must be rapidly carried on, until the whole frame-work of society be broken up.