PALEY NOT A MORALIST.

Schemes of conduct, grounded on calculations of sell interest, or on the average consequences of actions, supposed to be general, form a branch of political economy, to which let all due honor be given. Their utility is not here questioned. But however estimable within their own sphere such schemes, or any one of them in particular, may be, they do not belong to moral science, to which, both in kind and purpose, they are in all cases foreign, and, when substituted for it, hostile. Ethics, or the science of morality, does indeed in no wise exclude the consideration of action; but it contemplates the same in its originating spiritual source, without reference to space, or time, or sensible existence. Whatever 227 springs out of the perfect law of freedom, which exists only by its unity with the will of God, its inherence in the Word of God, and its communion with the Spirit of God— that (according to the principles of moral science) is good--it is light and righteousness and very truth. Whatever seeks to separate itself from the divine principle, and proceeds from a false centre in the agent's particular will, is evil--a work of darkness and contradiction. It is sin and essential falsehood. Not the outward deed, constructive, destructive, or neutral,--not the deed as a possible object of the senses,--is the object of ethical science. For this is no compost, collectorium or inventory of single duties; nor does it seek in the multitudinous sea, in the predetermined wave, and tides and currents of nature, that freedom which is exclusively an attribute of spirit. Like all other pure sciences, whatever it enunciates, and whatever it concludes, it enunciates and concludes absolutely. Strictness is its essential character: and its first proposition is, Whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all. For as the will or spirit, the source and substance of moral good, is one and all in every part; so must it be the totality, the whole articulated series of single acts, taken as unity, that can alone, in the severity of science, be recognised as the proper counterpart and adequate representative of a good will. Is it in this or that limb, or not rather in the whole body, the entire organismus, that the law of life reflects itself? Much less, then, can the law of the Spirit work in fragments. 228