press covetousness or avarice, on other and widely different considerations.

If we analyze the matter, the reason will appear no less evident than the fact is notorious. The legislator is himself essentially the subject of the community; and the jealousy of the body whose minister he is, though it allows, or even invites his interference to restrain that ferociousness of individual liberty which would endanger peace or property, forbids his exercising any jurisdiction in cases where these are not concerned, or extending his power beyond absolute right to moral duties. The authority delegated to the lawgiver for the public good emanates from the public itself: but no man gives another a title to regulate his thoughts, or prescribe the moral virtues which he shall exercise. This jurisdiction must originate elsewhere. It is a matter of certainty, for example, that no one can be privileged to take forcibly another's property; but it cannot be so plainly determined, whether he is bound to

give his own in charity. You have a right, it will be argued, to forbid my robbing my neighbour; but you have no right to insist on my relieving him. The same argument holds true with regard to gratitude, humanity, &c.; which on that very account have been termed virtues of imperfect obligation, since they depend upon a nice balance of circumstances, and cannot be rendered imperative by the letter of any general law: it also holds true of the personal duties which concern the regulation of the heart; they are an affair between man and his own conscience, and their essential or non-essential obligation is left to the private judgment of the individual.

But, on the other hand, if we imagine the case of the Deity, as moral Governor of the world, prescribing a system of laws to any of his creatures, the difference between laws of perfect and imperfect obligation vanishes at once. A new principle is introduced of paramount authority. The public safety is no longer the professed object of legislation, and

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the natural rights of mankind are no longer the limit of the legislator's power, who appears invested with other sovereignty than that which the people have intrusted to him, and with a higher title to his office than the consent of the community.

Supposing, therefore, the fact to be as pretended in the preamble to the Hebrew code, it were to be expected beforehand that the distinction usually preserved between rights and duties should be thrown down; that the empire of the legislator should be exerted over the conscience, and that the same authority which prohibited vice should command virtue.

In the provisions of the Hebrew law this antecedent expectation is completely answered. Moses is at the same time moralist and lawgiver and in virtue of this double office united in his own person, he extends his jurisdiction to a variety of cases which are confessedly beyond the reach of other legislators. He prescribes charity and benevolence as required by

*

the Creator, in the same tone with which he forbids murder, theft, and false witness, crimes acknowledged to be injurious to the community. Nay, he even proceeds to regulate the thoughts. Of this we have a familiar instance in the tenth commandment, which comprehensively lays an interdict against the very coveting or desiring any of the possessions of another and issues this wise but singular injunction, philosophically wise as coming from a moralist, but exclusively singular as delivered by a legislator, with the same consciousness of undisputed authority as when he forbids the overt acts of theft or adultery, of which a covetous desire is the original germ.

Relying on the same support and instructed by the same oracle, the legislator of the Hebrews imposes a restraint upon the passions which was not attempted in any other ancient

* The reader will observe that I represent as the peculiarity in Moses, his making the thoughts the subject of a law, not his declaring the guilt to consist in the intention; a truth which reason seems very early and universally to have discovered.

country:* and which is equally striking, whether contrasted with the habits of the civilized Greeks, or the general libertinism of Asiatic nations. Moses proscribes under the sanction of legislative authority and penalties, practices which we undoubtedly are taught by the light which Christianity has shed over our moral view to detest as criminal: but which few, even of the moralists of antiquity, and none of their lawgivers, either condemned by their sentence or discountenanced by their lives.† To enter into particulars on this head would be superfluous to those who are conversant with the defective morality of the heathen world, and to those who are not, unnecessarily disgusting.

Perhaps it may be supposed that the corruptions which had increased to so great a height before the æra of our acquaintance with ancient history, were the gradual progress of vice,

*

Joseph. contra Apion. ii. 30, &c.: and Eusebius, Præp. Evang. xiii. 20.

+ This subject has been treated at great length by Leland, Advantage of Revelation, part xi. chap. 3, &c.; also in Clarke's Evid. Prop. vi.