your
circumstances, your duties, your liabilities, the persons dependent on
you; he knows nothing about what is advisable or what is not; he only
says, "I speak _as_ a physician; if you would be well, give up your
profession, your trade, your office, whatever it is." However he may wish
it, it would be impertinent in him to say more, unless indeed he spoke,
not as a physician but as a friend; and it would be extravagant, if he
asserted that bodily health was the _summum bonum_, and that no one could
be virtuous whose animal system was not in good order.

11.

But now let us turn to the teaching of the actual Political Economist, in
his present fashionable shape. I will take a very favourable instance of
him: he shall be represented by a gentleman of high character, whose
religious views are sufficiently guaranteed to us by his being the special
choice, in this department of science, of a University removed more than
any other Protestant body of the day from sordid or unchristian principles
on the subject of money-making. I say, if there be a place where Political
Economy would be kept in order, and would not be suffered to leave the
high road and ride across the pastures and the gardens dedicated to other
studies, it is the University of Oxford. And if a man could anywhere be
found who would have too much good taste to offend the religious feeling
of the place, or to say any thing which he would himself allow to be
inconsistent with Revelation, I conceive it is the person whose temperate
and well-considered composition, as it would be generally accounted, I am
going to offer to your notice. Nor did it occasion any excitement whatever
on the part of the academical or the religious public, as did the
instances which I have hitherto been adducing. I am representing then the
science of Political Economy, in its independent or unbridled action, to
great advantage, when I select, as its specimen, the Inaugural Lecture
upon it, delivered in the University in question, by its first Professor.
Yet with all these circumstances in its favour, you will soon see,
Gentlemen, into what extravagance, for so I must call it, a grave lawyer
is led in praise of his chosen science, merely from the circumstance that
he has fixed his mind upon it, till he has forgotten there are subjects of
thought higher and more heavenly than it. You will find beyond mistake,
that it is his object to recommend the science of wealth, by claiming for
i