d correct ourselves.

{102}We should not avoid him as the detecter, but as the friendly
monitor. If he speaks severe truths, we should condemn our own conduct
which gives him the power.

It has frequently been observed, that the satirist has proved more
beneficial to the correction of a state than the divine or legislator.
Indeed he seems to have been created with peculiar penetrative
faculties, and integrity of disposition, and a happy genius to display
the enormity of the features, while it corrects the corrupt exercise
of our vices. The legislator may frame laws sufficiently wise and
judicious, to check and control villany, without the power of impeding
the progress of vice and folly, while they are kept within the limits of
only injuring ourselves. For law has no power to punish us for the vices
which debilitate our constitution, destroy our substance, or degrade our
character.

Nor can religion entirely extirpate vice, no more than she can even
control folly. Her two principles, alluring to virtue by promise of
reward, and dissuading from vice by threats of punishment, extend their
influence no farther than on those whose dispositions are susceptible
of their impressions. So that we find numbers among {103}mankind whose
conduct and opinions are beyond her power. The atheist, who disbelieves
a future existence, is not likely to check the exercise of his favourite
vicious habits for any hope of reward or dread of punishment; and the
debauchee, who, though he may not deny the truth of her tenets, yet is
too much absorbed in his pleasures, to listen to her precepts, or regard
her examples. Besides, there are many so weak in their resolution as
not to be capable of breaking the fetters of habit and prepossession,
although they are, at the same time, sensible of their destructive
consequences. It is, therefore, that nature has implanted in us a sense
which tends to correct our disposition, where law and religion are seen
to have no power. This sense is a desire of public estimation, which not
only tends to give mankind perfection in every art and science, but also
to render our personal character respectable. It is this susceptibility
of shame and infamy which gives satire its efficiency.

Without this sense of ourselves, the scourge would lose its power of
chastisement. We should receive the lashes without a sense of their
pain; and without the sense of their pain we would never amend from this
affliction. From the