irtue and vice; which "alters
not the nature of things," though men generally do judge of and
denominate their actions according to the esteem and fashion of the
place and sect they are of.

If he had been at the pains to reflect on what I had said, Bk. I. ch.
ii. sect. 18, and Bk. II. ch. xxviii. sect. 13, 14, 15 and 20, he would
have known what I think of the eternal and unalterable nature of right
and wrong, and what I call virtue and vice. And if he had observed that
in the place he quotes I only report as a matter of fact what OTHERS
call virtue and vice, he would not have found it liable to any great
exception. For I think I am not much out in saying that one of the rules
made use of in the world for a ground or measure of a moral relation
is--that esteem and reputation which several sorts of actions find
variously in the several societies of men, according to which they are
there called virtues or vices. And whatever authority the learned Mr.
Lowde places in his Old English Dictionary, I daresay it nowhere tells
him (if I should appeal to it) that the same action is not in credit,
called and counted a virtue, in one place, which, being in disrepute,
passes for and under the name of vice in another. The taking notice that
men bestow the names of 'virtue' and 'vice' according to this rule of
Reputation is all I have done, or can be laid to my charge to have done,
towards the making vice virtue or virtue vice. But the good man does
well, and as becomes his calling, to be watchful in such points, and to
take the alarm even at expressions, which, standing alone by themselves,
might sound ill and be suspected.

'Tis to this zeal, allowable in his function, that I forgive his citing
as he does these words of mine (ch. xxviii. sect. II): "Even the
exhortations of inspired teachers have not feared to appeal to common
repute, Philip, iv. 8;" without taking notice of those immediately
preceding, which introduce them, and run thus: "Whereby even in the
corruption of manners, the true boundaries of the law of nature, which
ought to be the rule of virtue and vice, were pretty well preserved. So
that even the exhortations of inspired teachers," &c. By which words,
and the rest of that section, it is plain that I brought that passage
of St. Paul, not to prove that the general measure of what men called
virtue and vice throughout the world was the reputation and fashion of
each particular society within itself; but to show that,