Your mathematics will lead you to the conviction, strong and irresistible as the demonstrative principles and reasonings upon which the whole of this noble science depends, that nothing but a God of all perfect wisdom and love could have endowed you with faculties and powers capable of deriving not only the highest mental gratifications from such a source, but of applying the discoveries which produce these gratifications to an infinite series of the most beneficial purposes.
Your chemistry will aid in teaching you that none but a Being infinitely wise and of boundless power and goodness, could possibly have contrived and arranged such a vast multitude of substances, in all their endless variety of combinations and affinities, such an immense world of multiform matter—all as it would seem conducive in some way or other to human comfort, gratification, or high enjoyment.
Your philosophy and metaphysics, will draw you irresistibly to a great first cause—the supreme, beneficent, ever bounteous Author of all the objects of our senses, of all the powers and conceptions of our understandings; and will indelibly stamp upon your hearts the sentiments of adoration, love and obedience, as the only proper tribute you could pay to a Being, who, so far as we can comprehend his works, hath made them all subservient, either directly or indirectly, to our own happiness, both in time and eternity. These sciences will bring home to your bosoms and business the vital truth that you have minds of vast powers of comprehension—faculties capable of undefinable expansion; and souls of such godlike energies, aspirations and capacities of enjoyment, as nothing less than a God of all power, wisdom and love, could either have created or bestowed. In a word, whatever path you may pursue within the whole circle of scientific and literary research, it will lead you, if under the constant guidance of moral and religious principles, to the possession of the chief good here on earth, and to "that house above, not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."
There are indeed no circumstances nor situations in which you can anticipate even the possibility of being placed, unless bereft of all consciousness or sanity of mind, that can exempt you from the obligation of making these principles the chart and compass as it were, by which you are to steer your earthly course. Let us imagine a few of such as most commonly occur in our progress through life—such as are matters of choice rather than necessity—and we shall then more clearly see the indispensable use of such a chart and compass to direct us safely and happily in our unavoidable passage to realms of eternal duration.
Almost every man, for example, at some period of his existence, desires to become a husband—to unite himself for life to some individual of the other sex, as a means of enjoying far greater happiness than he possibly could in any single state. It is a situation in which millions voluntarily place themselves—a situation of vast and complicated responsibilities—involving numerous relationships and duties of the highest imaginable importance, upon which depend not only the domestic and social happiness of individuals, but the moral condition of whole communities and nations. Yet, how few of these millions, even among the most deeply versed in scholastic lore, unless they are men of the soundest moral and religious principles, are ever guided in their choice by any thing but fancy, whim, caprice, or some other far less excusable motive? Their scholastic acquirements alone, never avail them in the slightest degree. The eye is usually the sole guide—the appellate court of reason and judgment not being so much as even consulted. When married, they generally become parents, and thereby incur duties the moat sacred and of the most awful responsibilities; for they are then answerable for the souls of others as well as for their own—for souls, with whose happiness they are intrusted even by the God of the universe himself! Yet how, let me ask, are these momentous duties generally fulfilled, even by the best scholars, unless they are also moral and religious men? Instead of fulfilment, we too often behold total neglect, nay frequently the grossest, most shameful, most criminal violation; and all this too by individuals who have obtained the highest collegiate honors. What is the fair inference from such facts? Why, that no education which has not the united principles that I am endeavoring to recommend for its basis, its means of completion, and its great end, can fit man even for the two most common and by far the most important conditions of life.
Let me call your attention now to a few of the chief professions in which the young men of our country are most apt to engage; and let us endeavor to ascertain how far mere scholastic acquirements, even of the highest grade, will enable you to pursue these professions with profit and honor to yourselves, and with benefit to the community of which you are members.
If you become physicians, without something more than the mere nominal worldy belief in the general utility of moral and religious principles, you will have nothing but the very feeble, seldom regarded check of worldy prudence, to restrain you from hurrying into the practice of the profession, before the proper preparation can possibly be made. Your own pecuniary emolument will become your chief object,—this you will be apt to pursue with no farther regard than your popularity requires, to the numerous risks you will incur of destroying both the health and life of others. You will hasten on in this course with a brevity of preparation far shorter than is deemed necessary to make even a good cook or washer-woman—although the thing to be practised upon, in the first case, is human life itself; while, in the latter cases, they are only the human appetite for food and some of the habiliments of the human body! Yet, it is upon the skill and humanity of the members of the medical profession, that society must depend for the alleviation or cure of all those indescribable miseries, under which, in the countless forms of sickness and disease, mankind are doomed to suffer to the end of the world—doomed alas! in a great measure, by their own vices and profligacy, superinduced by false education much more than by any naturally inherent defect either in their bodily or mental constitutions.
Should the profession of law be your choice, here also you will find that mere scholarship, mere literary and scientific acquirement, unsustained by deeply fixed, continually active, moral and religious principles, will avail you quite as little as in the practice of medicine. Instead of becoming "compounders of strife," as these principles enjoin us all to be, you will be much more apt to turn out encouragers of litigation. You will often without scruple aid the rapacious and vindictive in the gratification of their criminal passions, by defending them from the legal consequences of their indulgence. You will frequently vindicate the oppressor in his wrongs, assist guilt in seeking safety, and enable crime to escape its just and lawful punishment. Calumniators, thieves, robbers, and destroyers of life as well as of innocence, will be indebted to you for renewed opportunities of preying upon the peace, the property, the happiness of society. You will thus, as far as depends upon your professional labors, actually cherish crime, pervert justice, and defeat the ends of all those conservative laws which it should be your peculiar province to expound, your inviolable duty to sustain in all their purity and force, by never for a moment countenancing or aiding their violators. Then the appropriate punishment for every outrage against penal law would always follow every perpetration of unlawful deeds; for each fee offered by such enemies of mankind as commit atrocious crimes, would be considered and rejected either as the price of property wickedly gained—of innocence utterly ruined—of character irretrievably blasted, or of life criminally taken away. I do not speak of those doubtful cases wherein lawyers may be deceived by the ex parte statements of their clients; but of such as carry deep and damning guilt in their very face—of those in which the applicants for counsel prove themselves, by their own shewing, to be steeped as it were in infamy, iniquity and deadly crime—of those who practice injustice as a lucrative trade, ruin character by way of recreation, and destroy innocence as a pleasurable pursuit—of those who, as long as their money lasts, rely upon lawyers to defend them in making the property, the character, the happiness of others subservient to their own diabolical appetites and passions. Would all lawyers make it a point of conscience never to appear for such wretches, unless the courts assigned them as counsel, the criminals themselves would never be unjustly condemned; neither would they ever escape punishment, as they now often do, by the ingenious but highly pernicious sophistry of their hired defenders. Laws would then attain the great ends for which they were enacted, and our whole community would enjoy a far greater degree of safety from the perpetrators of crime than it has ever done heretofore.
Should political life be your choice, after finishing a scholastic course wherein both morals and religion have been so little regarded as not to be made paramount objects of pursuit, instead of becoming pure patriots, solely devoted to your country's good, you will be much more apt to turn constant calculators of the chances for personal aggrandizement—careful measurers and weighers of your own private interests against your public duties, and deep casuists in the means of evading or violating the last to promote the first, wherever your real purpose and only anxious desire may admit of probable concealment. You will become, with few exceptions, if possessed of sufficient talents and cunning, members of that most pernicious class of politicians called demagogues, who in fact have always proved the curse of every country wherein they have acquired political power. These have patriotism, patriotism, continually on their lips, but never in their hearts and actions—deeming it much easier to feign love of country than really to possess and exert it—much more thrifty to wheedle and cajole the people for their own base selfish purposes,—than manfully and like true friends combat their prejudices and inform their understandings. You will reach the lowest, most despicable grade of political prostitution, by turning man-worshippers; and soon learn to offer up your incense in exact proportion to the vanity of your idols and their power to gratify your wants; until at last you will neither see, hear, nor understand any thing but as they wish you; and will call black white, or white black—just as they bid you do. To this wretched state of degradation and self-abasement do most politicians sink themselves, whose educations have not been firmly based on sound, moral and religious principles.
Let us suppose, lastly, that you should prefer the mercantile profession to any other, after acquiring all the learning to be gained in the customary course of education. What will probably be your practice as merchants, if the principles which I am recommending as the essentials of all education, have not been made so of yours? Will this practice be guided by the social or the selfish principle? Will it be, "live and let live," or "live for self alone?" But very little observation and experience will compel you to admit that the latter maxim will in most cases be the ruling one. Nay, it will not only rule you, but blind you also to the great truth which should always govern the whole mercantile class, that all fair commerce is nothing more than an interchange of equivalents—a supplying of each other's wants—by which both sellers and buyers are mutually benefitted—a bond of peace and union, instead of a war of cunning for the accumulation of pelf. In fact every thing called commerce or barter, wherein this effect of mutual benefit does not take place, so far as depends upon the intention of the parties, is neither more nor less than fraud in disguise—fraud concealed under the specious title of skill in trade—in other words, it is an unjust attempt on both sides to get some undue advantage in the traffic. Such attempts you never would make—indeed you could not possibly make them, were your hearts constantly and deeply influenced, during the whole of your scholastic course, by the pure, the genuine principles of morality and religion, while your conduct was regulated by them as the guardians of your honor, the preservers of your reputation, the unerring guides that point the way from time to eternity.