strength, and
thy neighbor as thyself;' but the concentration of truth and beauty is
less resplendant, less engaging, less universally clear and interesting,
than in the character of him who deduced these two principles from all
the law and the prophets.

With these two principles, and all the subordinate ones which are
derived from them, are connected sanctions from above, which attest
their origin and secure their adoption. By an irreversible decree of Him
who founded nature and vouchsafed a revelation, certain states of
enjoyment and suffering are connected with the practical adoption or
rejection of the principles of duty, not by way of arbitrary
appointment, but of natural consequence. The relations of holiness and
happiness, of guilt and misery, are unalterable; shown to be so by the
teachings of nature and experience, by the explicit declarations of
Scripture, and by every species of evidence which the mind of man is
capable of receiving.

Though the chief object of the Christian revelation was to make this
relation more evident than it had ever been before, many who received
the Gospel imagine that it discovers to them a means by which the
relation may be suspended or destroyed. This misapprehension we hold to
be more fatal in its moral consequences than any other which human
prejudice has originated. By what appears to us a strange perversion of
Scripture language, and by the gradual increase of some subordinate
errors, it began to be imagined, some centuries ago, that, though misery
is necessarily connected with guilt, yet that the guilt may be
perpetrated by one person, and the consequent misery endured by another;
and this belief has subsisted in almost every Christian church till this
day. It is well that it has been confined to the churches, and that its
application has been limited, by all but Catholics, to one very
peculiar case; for if it had become the common doctrine of our schools,
and colleges, and homes, if it had been enforced by parents and moral
philosophers and professors as a general truth, as it is by divines with
reference to a particular case, the very foundations of virtue would
have been overthrown, and the force of its sanctions not only wasted but
fatally perverted.

Happily the accents of reason and religion have been too distinct and
harmonious to be overpowered by the dictates of error, or very
extensively neglected. Notwithstanding all that religious teachers have
erroneously i