matically to demonstrate the proportion of virtue or vice which belongs to each, by comparing them with the degrees of happiness or misery which they occasion. But though the production of happiness is the essence of virtue, it is by no means the end; the great end is the probation of mankind, or the giving them an opportunity of exalting or degrading themselves in another state by their behaviour in the present. And thus indeed it answers two most important purposes; those are the conservation of our happiness and the test of our obedience; or had not such a test seemed necessary to God's infinite wisdom, and productive of universal good, He would never have permitted the happiness of men, even in this life, to have depended on so precarious a tenure as their mutual good behaviour to each other. For it is observable that He who best knows our formation, has trusted no one thing of importance to our reason or virtue: He trusts only to our appetites for the support of the individual, and the continuance of our species; to our vanity or compassion, for our bounty to others; and to our fears, for the preservation of ourselves; often to our vices for the support of government, and sometimes to our follies for the preservation of our religion. But since some test of our obedience was necessary, nothing sure could have been commanded for that end so fit and proper, and at the same time so useful, as the practice of virtue: nothing could have been so justly rewarded with happiness as the production of happiness in conformity to the will of God. It is this conformity alone which adds merit to virtue, and constitutes the essential difference between morality and religion, Morality obliges men to live honestly and soberly, because such behaviour is most conducive to public happiness, and consequently to their own; religion, to pursue the same course, because conformable to the will of their Creator. Morality induces them to embrace virtue from prudential considerations; religion from those of gratitude and obedience. Morality therefore, entirely abstracted from religion, can have nothing meritorious in it; it being but wisdom, prudence, or good economy, which like health, beauty, or riches, are rather obligations conferred upon us by God, than merits in us towards him; for though we may be justly punished for injuring ourselves, we can claim no reward for self-preservation; as suicide deserves punishment and infamy, but a man deserves no reward or honours for not being guilty of it. This I take to be the meaning of all those passages in our Scriptures, in which works are represented to have no merit without faith; that is, not without believing in historical facts, in creeds, and articles; but without being done in pursuance of our belief in God, and in obedience to his commands. And now, having mentioned Scripture, I cannot omit observing that the Christian is the only religious or moral institution in the world, that ever set in a right light these two material points, the essence and the end of virtue, that ever founded the one in the production of happiness, that is, in universal benevolence, or, in their language, charity to all men; the other, in the probation of man, and his obedience to his Creator. Sublime and magnificent as was the philosophy of the ancients, all their moral systems were deficient in these two important articles. They were all built on the sandy foundations of the innate beauty of virtue, or enthusiastic patriotism; and their great point in view was the contemptible reward of human glory; foundations which were by no means able to support the magnificent structures which they erected upon them; for the beauty of virtue, independent of its effects, is unmeaning nonsense; patriotism, which injures mankind in general for the sake of a particular country, is but a more extended selfishness, and really criminal: and all human glory but a mean and ridiculous delusion. The whole affair then of religion and morality, the subject of so many thousand volumes, is, in short, no more than this: the

One of

Supreme Being, infinitely good, as well as powerful, desirous to diffuse happiness by all possible means, has created innumerable ranks and orders of beings, all subservient to each other by proper subordination. these is occupied by man, a creature endued with such a certain degree of knowledge, reason, and free-will, as is suitable to his situation, and placed for a time on this globe as in a school of probation and education. Here he has an opportunity given him of improving or debasing his nature, in such a manner as to render himself fit for a rank of higher perfection and happiness, or to degrade himself to a state of greater imperfection and misery; necessary indeed towards carrying on the business of the universe, but very grievous and burdensome to those individuals who, by their own misconduct, are obliged to submit to it. The test of this his behaviour, is doing good, that is, co-operating with his Creator, as far as his narrow sphere of action will permit, in the production of happiness. And thus the happiness and misery of a future state will be the just reward or punishment of promoting or preventing happiness in this. So artificially by this means is the nature of all human virtue and vice contrived, that their rewards and punishments are woven, as it were, in their very essence; their immediate effects give us a foretaste of their future, and their fruits in the present life are the proper samples of what they must unavoidably produce in another. We have reason given us to distinguish these consequences, and regulate our conduct; and, lest that should neglect its post, conscience also is appointed as an instinctive kind of monitor, perpetually to remind us both of our interest and our duty."

Si sic omnia dixisset! To this account of the essence of vice and virtue, it is only necessary to add, that the consequences of human actions being sometimes uncertain, and sometimes remote, it is not possible in many cases for most men, nor in all cases for any man to determine what actions will ultimately produce happiness, and therefore it was proper that revelation should lay down a rule to be followed invariably in opposition to appearances, and in every change of circumstances, by which we may be,certain to promote the general felicity, and be set free from the dangerous temptation of doing Evil that Good may come.

Because it may easily happen, and in effect will happen very frequently, that our own private happiness may be promoted by an act injurious to others, when yet no man can be obliged by nature to prefer ultimately the happiness of others to his own; therefore, to the instructions of infinite wisdom it was necessary that infinite power should add penal sanctions. That every man to whom those instructions shall be imparted may know, that he can never ultimately injure himself by benefiting others, or ultimately by injuring others benefit himself; but that however the lot of the good and bad may be huddled together in the seeming confusion of our present state, the time shall undoubtedly come, when the most virtuous will be most happy.

I am sorry that the remaining part of this Letter is not equal to the first. The author has indeed engaged in a disquisition in which we need not wonder if he fails, in the solution of questions on which philosophers have employed their abilities from the earliest times, a oddog of ANGE beu plusplo qTOV QER

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He denies that man was created perfect, because the system requires subordination, and because the power of losing his perfection, of rendering himself wicked and miserable, is the highest imperfection imaginable." Besides, the regular gradations of the scale of being required somewhere "such

a creature as man with all his infirmities about him, and the total remova of those would be altering his nature, and when he became perfect he must cease to be man.

I have already spent some considerations on the scale of being, of which yet I am obliged to renew the mention whenever a new argument is made to rest upon it; and I must therefore again remark, that consequences cannot have greater certainty than the postulate from which they are drawn, and that no system can be more hypothetical than this, and perhaps no hypothesis more absurd.

He again deceives himself with respect to the perfection with which man is held to be originally vested. "That man came perfect, that is, endued with all possible perfection, out of the hands of his Creator, is a false notion, derived from the philosophers. The universal system required subordination, and consequently comparative imperfection." That man was ever endued with all possible perfection, that is, with all perfection of which the idea is not contradictory, or destructive of itself, is undoubtedly false. But it can hardly be called a false notion, because no man ever thought it, nor can it be derived from the philosophers; for without pretending to guess what philosophers he may mean, it is very safe to affirm, that no philosopher ever said it. Of those who now maintain that man was once perfect, who may very easily be found, let the author inquire whether man was ever omniscient, whether he was ever omnipotent, whether he ever had even the lower power of archangels or ahgels. Their answers will soon inform him, that the supposed perfection of man was not absolute, but respective, that he was perfect in a sense consistent enough with subordination; perfect, not as compared with different beings, but with himself in his present degeneracy; not perfect as an angel, but perfect as man.

From this perfection, whatever it was, he thinks it necessary that man should be debarred, because pain is necessary to the good of the universe; and the pain of one order of beings extending its salutary influence to innumerable orders above and below, it was necessary that man should suffer; but because it is not suitable to justice that pain should be inflicted on innocence, it was necessary that man should be criminal.

This is given as a satisfactory account of the Original of moral Evil, which amounts only to this, that God created beings whose guilt he foreknew, in order that he might have proper objects of pain, because the pain of part is, no man knows how or why, necessary to the felicity of the whole.

The perfection which man once had, may be so easily conceived, that without any unusual strain of imagination we can figure its revival. All the duties to God or man that are neglected we may fancy performed; all the crimes that are committed we may conceive forborne. Man will then be restored to his moral perfections: and into what head can it enter, that by this change the universal system would be shaken, or the condition of any order of beings altered for the worse?

He comes in the fifth Letter to political, and in the sixth to religious Evils. Of political Evil, if we suppose the Origin of moral Evil discovered, the account is by no means difficult: polity being only the conduct of immoral men in public affairs. The Evils of each particular kind of government are very clearly and elegantly displayed, and from their secondary causes very rationally deduced; but the first cause lies still in its ancient obscurity. There is in this Letter nothing new, nor anything eminently instructive; one of his practical deductions, that from government Evils cannot be eradicated, and their excess only can be prevented," has always been allowed; the question upon which all dissension arises is, when that excess begins, at what point men shall cease to bear, and attempt to remedy.

Another of his precepts, though not new, well deserves to be transcribed, because it cannot be too frequently impressed.

What has here been said of their imperfections and abuses, is by no means intended as a defence of them: every wise man ought to redress them to the utmost of his power; which can be effected by one method only; that is, by a reformation of manners: for as all political Evils derive their original from moral, these can never be removed, until those are first amended. He, therefore, who strictly adheres to virtue and sobriety in his conduct, and enforces them by his example, does more real service to a state, than he who displaces a minister, or dethrones a tyrant; this gives but a temporary relief, but that exterminates the cause of the disease. No immoral man then can possibly be a true patriot: and all those who profess outrageous zeal for the liberty and prosperity of their country, and at the same time infringe her laws, affront her religion, and debauch her people, are but despicable quacks, by fraud or ignorance increasing the disorders they pretend to remedy."

Of religion he has said nothing but what he has learned, or might have learned from the divines: that it is not universal, because it must be received upon conviction, and successively received by those whom conviction reached; that its evidences and sanctions are not irresistible, because it was intended to induce, not to compel; and that it is obscure, because we want faculties to comprehend it. What he means by his assertion, that it wants policy, I do not well understand; he does not mean to deny that a good Christian will be a good governor, or a good subject; and he has before justly observed, that the good man only is a patriot.

Religion has been, he says, corrupted by the wickedness of those to whom it was communicated, and has lost part of its efficacy by its connexion with temporal interest and human passion.

He justly observes, that from all this, no conclusion can be drawn against the divine original of Christianity, since the objections arise not from the nature of the revelation, but of him to whom it is communicated.

All this is known, and all this is true; but why, we have not yet discovered. Our author, if I understand him right, pursues the argument thus: the religion of man produces evils, because the morality of man is imperfect; his morality is imperfect, that he may be justly a subject of punishment: he is made a subject to punishment because the pain of part is necessary to the happiness of the whole: pain is necessary to happiness no mortal can tell why or how.

Thus, after having clambered with great labour from one step of argumentation to another, instead of rising into the light of knowledge, we are devolved back into dark ignorance; and all our effort ends in belief, that for the Evils of life there is some good reason, and in confession, that the reason cannot be found. This is all that has been produced by the revival of Chrysippus's untractableness of matter, and the Arabian scale of existence. A system has been raised, which is so ready to fall to pieces of itself, that no great praise can be derived from its destruction. To object is always easy, and it has been well observed by a late writer, that the hand which cannot build a hovel, may demolish a temple.*

[IT will not be thought out of place at the end of this Volume to mention a few of the more important facts regarding our greater poets which have come to light since Johnson wrote their lives.hon

1. ABRAHAM COWLEY was the son of a stationer, not of a grocer. Thomas Cowley, the father, died before the birth of his son, leaving by Will 1407. to each of his six children, and the same sum to "the child or children which my wife now goeth withal." The poet's own Will, a very interesting one, was discovered by Peter Cunningham, in the Prerogative Will Office of the Court of Canterbury, and printed by him in the Shakspeare Society Papers.

2. Thirty-nine years after Johnson's death, an old bundle of papers addressed To Mr. Skinner, Merchant, turned up in the State Paper Office; and amongst its contents was the long-lost Essay by MILTON, on the Doctrines of Christianity. The discovery created considerable excitement, and George IV. ordered that the MS. should be translated and edited by Charles Sumner, afterwards Bishop of Winchester. It is perhaps as well that it was unknown to Johnson, as the opinions maintained in it would certainly not have diminished the acrimony of the abuse, or the reluctance of the praise, which he has bestowed upon its illustrious author. At the same time, as Macaulay says, it is difficult to understand how any person could have read Paradise Lost without suspecting Milton of Arianism, or have studied his life without perceiving his peculiar theories on the subject of Marriage. But School Divinity in one sense is almost as extinct a science as Alchymy or Astrology. Even the name of Milton could do no more than excite a galvanic spasm or two in its bulky corpse; and the long-lost Treatise is now only remembered as the text on which the young Macaulay framed the first, and perhaps the most admirable, of his noble series of Essays. This is strange enough, but it is still stranger that while such editors as Thomas Warton, Sir Egerton Brydges, and Dr. Mitford have taken the most elaborate care to preserve the most minute verbal differences between the printed version of Comus, and the original autograph copy preserved at Cambridge, they should have taken no notice whatever of a long passage of fourteen lines, essential to the sense of the noble opening speech of the Masque, and evidently omitted for the mere convenience of representation. The omitted lines are marked with inverted commas.

Before the starry threshold of Jove's court

My mansion is, where those immortal shapes

Of bright aërial spirits live insphered

In regions mild of calm and serene air,