ught;--Our improvement is
in proportion to our purpose;--We hardly ever manage to get completely
rid even of one fault, and do not set our hearts on _daily_
improvement;--Always place a definite purpose before thee;--Get the
habit of mastering thine inclination._) These are moral precepts, and
moral precepts of the best kind. As rules to hold possession of our
conduct, and to keep us in the right course through outward troubles and
inward perplexity, they are equal to the best ever furnished by the
great masters of morals--Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

But moral rules, apprehended as ideas first, and then rigorously
followed as laws, are, and must be, for the sage only. The mass of
mankind have neither force of intellect enough to apprehend them clearly
as ideas, nor force of character enough to follow them strictly as laws.
The mass of mankind can be carried along a course full of hardship for
the natural man, can be borne over the thousand impediments of the
narrow way, only by the tide of a joyful and bounding emotion. It is
impossible to rise from reading Epictetus[185]or Marcus Aurelius
without a sense of constraint and melancholy, without feeling that the
burden laid upon man is well-nigh greater than he can bear. Honor to the
sages who have felt this, and yet have borne it! Yet, even for the sage,
this sense of labor and sorrow in his march towards the goal constitutes
a relative inferiority; the noblest souls of whatever creed, the pagan
Empedocles[186] as well as the Christian Paul, have insisted on the
necessity of an inspiration, a joyful emotion, to make moral action
perfect; an obscure indication of this necessity is the one drop of
truth in the ocean of verbiage with which the controversy on
justification by faith has flooded the world. But, for the ordinary man,
this sense of labor and sorrow constitutes an absolute disqualification;
it paralyzes him; under the weight of it, he cannot make way towards the
goal at all. The paramount virtue of religion is, that it has _lighted
up_ morality; that it has supplied the emotion and inspiration needful
for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the
ordinary man along it at all. Even the religions with most dross in them
have had something of this virtue; but the Christian religion manifests
it with unexampled splendor. "Lead me, Zeus and Destiny!" says the
prayer of Epictetus, "whithersoever I am appointed to go; I will follow
without wa