e said, the
elements of universal order, or, in the language of Clarke, the fitness of
things. As the mind must of necessity contemplate and cognize objects of
thought under the categories intuitively discerned by the theoretical
reason, so must the will be moved by the conditions and laws intuitively
discerned by the practical reason. This intuition is law and obligation.
Man can obey it, and to obey it is virtue. He can disobey it, and in so
doing he does not yield to necessity, but makes a voluntary choice of
wrong and evil.

* * * * *

It will be perceived from the historical survey in this and the previous
chapter, that--as was said at the outset--*all ethical systems resolve
themselves into the two classes of which the Epicureans and the Stoics
furnished the pristine types,*--those which make virtue an accident, a
variable, subject to authority, occasion, or circumstance; and those which
endow it with an intrinsic right, immutableness, validity, and supremacy.
On subjects of fundamental moment, opinion is of prime importance. Conduct
results from feeling, and feeling from opinion. We would have the youth,
from the very earliest period of his moral agency, grounded in the belief
that right and wrong are immutable,--that they have no localities, no
meridians,--that, with a change of surroundings, their conditions and laws
vary as little as do those of planetary or stellar motion. Let him feel
that right and wrong are not the mere dicta of human teaching, nay, are
not created even by revelation; but let their immutable distinction
express itself to his consciousness in those sublime words which belong to
it, as personified in holy writ, "Jehovah possessed me from the beginning
of his way, before his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from
the beginning, or ever the earth was. When He prepared the heavens, I was
there. When He appointed the foundations of the earth, then was I by Him."
This conception of the Divine and everlasting sacredness of virtue, is a
perennial fountain of strength. He who has this does not imagine that he
has power over the Right, can sway it by his choice, or vary its standard
by his action; but it overmasters him, and, by subduing, frees him, fills
and energizes his whole being, ennobles all his powers, exalts and hallows
all his affections, makes him a priest to God, and a king among men.

INDEX.

Abstinence, when to be preferred to temp