by whatever name you may please to call it, acts by
motives and considerations suited to our condition; and which, putting
it at the very lowest, must be confessed, in our present infirm state,
to be an habitual aid and an ever present support to the feebleness of
virtue! In a selfish world it produces the effects of disinterestedness,
and when public spirit is extinct, it supplies the want of patriotism.
Let us therefore with gratitude avail ourselves of its help, and not
relinquish the good which it freely offers, from we know not what vain
dreams of impracticable purity and unattainable perfection."

All this and much more might be urged by the advocates of this favourite
principle. It would be however no difficult task to shew that it by no
means merits this high eulogium. To say nothing of that larger part of
the argument of our opponents, which betrays, and even proceeds upon,
that mischievous notion of the innocence of error, against which we have
already entered our formal protest, the principle in question is
manifestly of a most inconstant and variable nature; as inconstant and
variable as the innumerably diversified modes of fashions, habits, and
opinions in different periods and societies. What it tolerates in one
age, it forbids in another; what in one country it prescribes and
applauds, in another it condemns and stigmatizes! Obviously and openly,
it often takes vice into its patronage, and sets itself in direct
opposition to virtue. It is calculated to produce rather the
_appearance_ than the _reality_ of excellence; and at best not to check
the _love_ but only the _commission_ of vice. Much of this indeed was
seen and acknowledged by the philosophers, and even by the poets, of the
Pagan world. They declaimed against it as a mutable and inconsistent
principle; they lamented the fatal effects which, under the name of
false glory, it had produced on the peace and happiness of mankind. They
condemned the pursuit of it when it led its followers out of the path of
virtue, and taught that the praise of the wise and of the good only was
to be desired.

But it was reserved for the page of Scripture to point out to us
distinctly, wherein it is apt to be essentially defective and vicious,
and to discover to us more fully its encroaching nature and dangerous
tendencies; teaching us at the same time, how, being purified from its
corrupt qualities, and reduced under just subordination, it may be
brought into legitim