r Reviewer may, if he pleases,
indulge himself like Sultan Schahriar with espousing a rapid succession
of virgin theories. But we must beg to be excused from playing the part
of the vizier who regularly attended on the day after the wedding to
strangle the new Sultana.

The Westminster Reviewer charges us with urging it as an objection to
the "greatest happiness principle" that "it is included in the Christian
morality." This is a mere fiction of his own. We never attacked the
morality of the Gospel. We blamed the Utilitarians for claiming the
credit of a discovery, when they had merely stolen that morality, and
spoiled it in the stealing. They have taken the precept of Christ and
left the motive; and they demand the praise of a most wonderful and
beneficial invention, when all that they have done has been to make
a most useful maxim useless by separating it from its sanction. On
religious principles it is true that every individual will best promote
his own happiness by promoting the happiness of others. But if religious
considerations be left out of the question it is not true. If we do not
reason on the supposition of a future state, where is the motive? If we
do reason on that supposition, where is the discovery?

The Westminster Reviewer tells us that "we wish to see the science of
Government unsettled because we see no prospect of a settlement which
accords with our interests." His angry eagerness to have questions
settled resembles that of a judge in one of Dryden's plays--the
Amphitryon, we think--who wishes to decide a cause after hearing only
one party, and, when he has been at last compelled to listen to the
statement of the defendant, flies into a passion, and exclaims, "There
now, sir! See what you have done. The case was quite clear a minute ago;
and you must come and puzzle it!" He is the zealot of a sect. We are
searchers after truth. He wishes to have the question settled. We wish
to have it sifted first. The querulous manner in which we have been
blamed for attacking Mr Mill's system, and propounding no system of
our own, reminds us of the horror with which that shallow dogmatist,
Epicurus, the worst parts of whose nonsense the Utilitarians have
attempted to revive, shrank from the keen and searching scepticism of
the second Academy.

It is not our fault that an experimental science of vast extent does not
admit of being settled by a short demonstration; that the subtilty
of nature, in the moral as