at arbiter of
the merit and demerit of human conduct, has little intuitive sense of
right, and is not guided entirely by reason, but is governed in a great
measure by what men believe. Indeed, faith is the legitimate regulator
of the conscience. If a man has correct views of duty to God and men, he
will have a correct conscience; but if he can, by a wrong view of morals
and of the character of God, be induced to believe that theft, or
murder, or any vice, is right, his conscience will be corrupted by his
faith. When men are brought to believe--as they frequently do in heathen
countries--that it is right to commit suicide, or infanticide, as a
religious duty, their conscience condemns them if they do not perform
the act. Thus that power in the soul which pronounces upon the moral
character of human conduct, is itself dependent upon and regulated by
the faith of the individual. It is apparent, therefore, that the
reception and belief of a true rule of duty, accompanied with proper
sanctions, will alone form in men a proper conscience. God has so
constituted the soul that it is necessary, in order to the regulation of
its moral powers, that it should have a rule of duty, revealed under the
sanction of its Maker's authority; otherwise its high moral powers would
lie in dark and perpetual disorder.

Further, unless the human soul be an exception, God governs all things
by laws adopted to their proper nature. The laws which govern the
material world are sketched in the books on natural science; such are
gravitation, affinity, mathematical motion. Those laws by which the
irrational animal creations are controlled are usually called instincts.
Their operation and design are sketched, to some extent, in treatises
upon the instincts of animals. Such is the law which leads the beaver to
build its dam, and all other animals to pursue some particular habits
instead of others. All beavers, from the first one created to the
present time, have been instinctively led to build a dam in the same
manner, and so their instinct will lead them to build till the end of
time. The law which drives them to the act is as necessitating as the
law which causes the smoke to rise upwards. Nothing in the universe of
God, animate or inanimate, is left without the government of appropriate
law, unless that thing being the noblest creature of God: the human
spirit. To suppose, therefore, that the human soul is thus left unguided
by a revealed rule of cond