are as sure of it as you are that the sun
shines. If you feel miserable, you are so. A sense of neglected duty, a
consciousness that you have done wrong, and are displeased with yourself
for it; a certainty that God is displeased with you for wrong-doing, and
that he will show his displeasure by suitable punishment; the tenacious
grasp of vicious habits on your body and soul, and the fearful thought
that by the law of your nature these vipers, which you vainly struggle
to shake off, will forever keep involving you more closely in their
cursed coils--these are _facts of your experience_. You are as certain
that they give you disquiet of mind, when you entertain them, as that
the sea rages in a tempest; and that you can no more prevent their
entrance, nor compel their departure, nor calm nor drown the anxiety
they occasion, than you can prevent the rising of the tempest, dismiss
the thunder-storm, or drown Etna in your wine-glass. Of these primary
facts of moral science, and of others like them, you possess the most
absolute and infallible certainty from your own consciousness. They
result from the inertia of moral matter, which, when put into a state of
disturbance, has no power of bringing itself to rest; as expressed in
the formula, _There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked._[381]

Let us now go out of your own experience, as you must do in every other
science, into the region of observation, and study a few of the other
phenomena of religion. Your comrade, Jones, has taken to drinking of
late, and also to going with you to Sunday lectures, and in the evening
to other places of amusement. He has, however, been warned that the next
time he comes drunk to the workshop he will be discharged; and as he is
a clever young fellow, and knows more about the Bible than you, having
gone to Sabbath-school when a boy, and is able to use up the saints
cleverly, you would be sorry to lose his company. So you set on him to
go with you to hear a temperance lecture, hoping that he may be induced
to take the pledge; for if he does not you fear he will soon lie in the
gutter. He curses you, and himself too, if ever he listens to any such
stuff; and refuses to go. You can easily gather a hundred other
illustrations of the great law of the moral repulsion between vice and
truth, expressed in the following formula: "_This is the condemnation,
that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than
light, because their deed