APHORISM XIII.

Wherever there exists a permanent** learned class, having authority, and possessing the respect and confidence of the country; and wherever the science of ethics is acknowledged and taught in this class, as a regular part of a learned education, to its future members generally, but as the special study and indispensable ground work of such as are intended for holy orders; there the article of original sin will be an axiom of faith in all classes. Among the learned an undisputed truth, and with the people a fact, which no man imagines it possible to deny: and the doctrine, thus inwoven in the faith of all, and coeval with the consciousness of each, will, for each and all, possess a reality, subjective indeed, yet virtually equivalent to that which we intuitively give to the objects of our senses.

With the learned this will be the case, because the article is the first--I had almost said spontaneous--product of the application of moral science to history, of which it is the interpreter. A mystery in its own right, and by the necessity and essential character of its subject--(for the win, like the life, in every act and product

**A learned order must be supposed to consist of three classes. First, those who are employed in adding to the existing sum of power and knowledge. Second, and most numerous class, those whose office it is to diffuse through the community at large the practical results of science, and that kind and degree of knowledge and cultivation, which for all is requisite or clearly useful. Third, the formers and instructors of the second--in schools, halls, and universities, or through the medium of the press. The second class includes not only the Parochial Clergy, and all others duly ordained to the ministerial office; but likewise all the members of the legal and medical professions, who have received a learned education under accredited and responsible teachers. (See the Church and State, p. 45, &c., 3d edit. Ed.) 229 pre-supposes to itself a past always present, a present that evermore resolves itself into a past)--the doctrine of original sin gives to all the other mysteries of religion a common basis, a connection of dependency, an intelligibility of relation, and a total harmony, which supersede extrinsic proof. There is here that same proof from unity of purpose, that same evidence of symmetry, which in the contemplation of a human skeleton, flashed conviction on the mind of Galen, and kindled meditation into a hymn of praise.

Meanwhile the people, not goaded into doubt by the lessons and examples of their teachers and superiors; not drawn away from the fixed stars of heaven--the form and magnitude of which are the same for the naked eye of the shepherd as for the telescope of the sage--from the immediate truths, I mean, of reason and conscience, to an exercise to which they have not been trained,--of a faculty which has been imperfectly developed,--on a subject not within the sphere of the faculty, nor in any way amenable to its judgment;--the people will need no arguments to receive a doctrine confirmed by their own experience from within and from without, and intimately blended with the most venerable traditions common to all races, and the traces of which linger in the latest twilight of civilization.

Among the revulsions consequent on the brute bewilderments of a Godless revolution, a great and active zeal for the interests of religion may be one. I dare not trust it, till I have seen what it is that gives religion this interest, till I am satisfied that it is not the interests of this world; necessary and laudable interests, perhaps, but which may, I dare believe, be secured as effectually and more suitably by the prudence of this world, and by this world's powers and motives. At all events, I find nothing 230 in the fashion of the day to deter me from adding, that the reverse of the preceding--that where religion is valued and patronised as a supplement of law, or an aid extraordinary of police; where moral science is exploded as the mystic jargon of dark ages; where a lax system of consequences, by which every iniquity on earth may be (and how many have been!) denounced and defended with equal plausibility, is publicly and authoritatively taught as moral philosophy; where the mysteries of religion, and truths supersensual, are either cut and squared for the comprehension of the understanding, the faculty of judging according to sense, or desperately torn asunder from the reason, nay, fanatically opposed to it; lastly, where private* interpretation

*The Author of the Statesman's Manual must be the most inconsistent of men, if he can be justly suspected of a leaning to the Romish Church; or if it be necessary for him to repeat his fervent Amen to the wish and prayer of our late good old king, that "every adult in the British Empire should be able to read his Bible, and have a Bible to read!" Nevertheless, it may not be superfluous to declare, that in thus protesting against the license of private interpretation, I do not mean to condemn the exercise or deny the right of individual judgment, I condemn only the pretended right of every individual, competent and incompetent, to interpret Scripture in a sense of his own, in opposition to the judgment of the Church, without knowledge of the originals or of the languages, the history, customs, opinions, and controversies of the age and country in which they were written; and where the interpreter judges in ignorance or in contempt of uninterrupted tradition, the unanimous consent of Fathers and Councils, and the universal faith of the Church in all ages. It is not the attempt to form a judgment, which is here called in question; but the grounds, or rather the no-grounds on which the judgment is formed and relied on.

My fixed principle is: that a Christianity without a Church exercising spiritual authority is vanity and dissolution. And my belief is, that when Popery is rushing in on us like an inundation, the nation will find it to be so. I say Popery; for this too I hold for a delusion, that Romanism or Roman Catholicism is separable from Popery. Almost as readily could I suppose a circle without a centre. 231 is every thing, and the Church nothing--there the mystery of original sin will be either rejected, or evaded, or perverted into the monstrous fiction of hereditary sin,--guilt inherited; in the mystery of Redemption metaphors will be obtruded for the reality; and in the mysterious appurtenants and symbols of Redemption (regeneration, grace, the Eucharist, and spiritual communion) the realities will be evaporated into metaphors.