frugal or
diligent, humble or aspiring, the particular circumstances and
limitations in which they are to be applied being indeterminate! But
is not the experience of every day and of all the world against it? Is
not the early and sedulous inculcation of just maxims of duty fell
to be a great auxiliary to its performance in the circumstances in
which it is necessary to apply them? Is not the possession of a general
rule, with the advantages of a clear and concise expression,--in the
form of familiar proverbs, or embodied in powerful imagery,--a potent
suggestive to the mind; not only whispering of duty, but, by perpetual
recurrence, aiding the habit of attending to it? Is not the early and
earnest iteration of such sententious wisdom in the ears of the young,
--the honor which has been paid to sages who have elicited it, or
felicitously expressed it,--the care with which these treasures of
moral wisdom have been garnered up,--the perpetual efforts to conjoin
elementary moral truth with the fancy and association,--is not all
this a standing testimony to a consciousness of the value of such
auxiliaries of virtue and duty? Is it not felt, that, however general
such truths may be, the very forms of expression,--the portable shape
in which the truth is presented,--have an immense value in relation
to practice? Admitting, therefore, as before,--but, as before, only
conceding it for argument's sake (for the limits of variation, even
as regards the elementary truths of morals, are, as experience shows,
very wide),--that each man in some shape could anticipate for himself
the more important ethical truth, there would be yet ample scope left
for the utility of a divinely constructed instrument for its exhibition
and enforcement, in perfect harmony with the modes in which it is
actually exhibited and enforced by man, in close analogy with the
form in which he attempts the same task, whenever he teaches any
practical art or method whatever.

Only may it not be again presumed here, that He who knows perfectly
"what is in man" would be able to perform the work with
correspondent perfection? Whether He has performed it in the Bible
or not, that book does, at all events, contain not merely a larger
portion of pure ethical truth than any other in the world, but ethical
truth expressed and exhibited (as Mr. Newman himself, and most other
persons, would admit) in modes incomparably better adapted than in
any other book to lay hold of the