Page:Sphere and Duties of Government.djvu/101

81 Now, neither that which morality prescribes as a duty, nor that which gives sanction to its dictates and recommends them to the will, is dependent on religious ideas. I will not dwell on the consideration that such a dependency would even impair the purity of the moral will. In reasoning derived from experience, and to be similarly referred to it, this position might not be thought sufficiently valid. But the qualities of an action which constitute it a duty, arise partly from the very nature of the human soul, and partly from the stricter reference to men's mutual relations; and, although it is certain that these qualities are especially recommended and enhanced by a feeling of religion, this is neither the sole medium of impressing them on the heart, nor by any means one which admits of application to every variety of character. On the contrary, religion depends wholly for its efficiency on the individual nature, and is, in the strictest acceptation, subjective. The man whose character is cold and essentially reflective—whose conception never passes into sensation—with whom it is enough to see clearly the natural tendency of things to shape his resolution accordingly, needs no religious motive to induce him to adopt a course of virtuous action, and, as far as is consistent with such a form of character, to be virtuous. But it is wholly otherwise in the opposite case, where the capacity of sensation is peculiarly strong, and every thought rapidly merges in feeling. And yet even here the shades and modifications of character are infinitely various. Tor example, wherever the soul feels a strong and resistless impulse to pass out from itself, and establish a union with others, religious ideas will prove genuine and efficient motives. But, on the other hand, there are varieties of character in which so intimate a sequence prevails between all feeling and ideas—which share such a profundity of conception and sensation, that they acquire a measure of strength and self-reliance