Page:Observations on Man 1834.djvu/345

 Thirdly, The many benefits which we receive immediately from, or which have some evident, though distant, connexion with the piety, benevolence, and temperance of others; also the contrary mischiefs from their vices; lead us first to the love and hatred of the persons themselves by association, as explained under the head of sympathy, and then by farther associations to the love and hatred of the virtues and vices, considered abstractedly, and without any regard to our own interest; and that whether we view them in ourselves or others. As our love and esteem for virtue in others is much increased by the pleasing consciousness, which our own practice of it affords to ourselves, so the pleasure of this consciousness is much increased by our love of virtue in others.

Fourthly, The great suitableness of all the virtues to each other, and to the beauty, order, and perfection of the world, animate and inanimate, impresses a very lovely character upon virtue; and the contrary self-contradiction, deformity, and mischievous tendency of vice, render it odious, and matter of abhorrence to all persons that reflect upon these things; and beget a language of this kind, which is borrowed, in great measure, from the pleasures and pains of imagination, and applied with a peculiar force and fitness to this subject from its great importance.

Fifthly, The hopes and fears which arise from the consideration of a future state, are themselves pleasures and pains of a high nature. When, therefore, a sufficient foundation has been laid by a practical belief of religion, natural and revealed, by the frequent view of, and meditation upon, death, by the loss of departed friends, by bodily pains, by worldly disappointments and afflictions, for forming strong associations of the pleasures of these hopes with duty, and the pains of these fears with sin, the reiterated impressions of those associations will at last make duty itself a pleasure, and convert sin into a pain, giving a lustre and deformity respectively to all their appellations; and that without any express recollection of the hopes and fears of another world, just as in other cases of association.

Sixthly, All meditations upon God, who is the inexhaustible fountain, and infinite abyss, of all perfection, both natural and moral; also all the kinds of prayer, i.e. all the ways of expressing our love, hope, trust, resignation, gratitude, reverence, fear, desire, &c. towards him; transfer, by association, all the perfection, greatness, and gloriousness of his natural attributes upon his moral ones, i.e. upon moral rectitude. We shall by this means learn to be merciful, holy, and perfect, because God is so; and to love mercy, holiness, and perfection, wherever we see them.

And thus we may perceive, that all the pleasures and pains of sensation, imagination, ambition, self-interest, sympathy, and theopathy, as far as they are consistent with one another, with the frame of our natures, and with the course of the world, beget