as a destroyer, and rifle every home of those virtues which at once guard and adorn it. The actual and the beautiful result, when viewed in connexion with that moral force, by the insertion of which in our nature it is accomplished, strongly bespeaks a presiding intellect-which in framing the mechanism of the human mind, had respect to what was most beneficent and best for the mechanism of human society.

14. It is well that man is so much the creature of a constitution which is anterior to his own wisdom and his own will, and of circumstances which are also anterior to his wisdom and his will. It would have needed a far more comprehensive view than we are equal to, both of what was best for men in a community and for man as an individual, to have left a creature so shortsighted or of such brief and narrow survey, with the fixing either of his own principles of action or of his relation with the external world. That constitutional shame, that quick and trembling delicacy, a prompt and ever-present guardian, appearing as it does in very early childhood, is most assuredly not a result from any anticipation by us, either of future or distant consequences. Even the moral sense within us, does not speak so loudly or so distinctly the evil of this transgression, as it does of falsehood, or of injurious freedom with the property of a neighbour, or of personal violence. Other forces than those of human prudence or human principle seem to have been necessary, for resisting a most powerful and destructive fascination, which never is indulged, without

deterioration to the whole structure of the moral character and constitution; and which, when once permitted to lord it over the habits, so often terminates in the cruel disruption of families, and the irretrievable ruin and disgrace of the offender. It is not by any prospective calculation of ours, that this natural modesty, acting as a strong precautionary check against evils which however tremendous, we are too heedless to reflect upon, has been established within us. It is directly implanted by one, who sees the end from the beginning; and so forms altogether a most palpable instance, in which we have reason to congratulate ourselves, that the well-being of man, instead of being abandoned to himself, has been placed so immediately under the management of better and higher hands.

15. There are many other special affections in our nature the principal of which will fall to be noticed in succeeding chapters; and the interests to which they are respectively subservient form a natural ground of division, in our treatment of them. Certain of these affections stand related to the civil, and certain of them to the economic well-being of society; and each of these subserviencies will form the subject of a separate argument.

CHAPTER III.

On those special Affections which conduce to the civil and political Well-being of Society.

1. THE first step towards the aggregation of men into a community, or the first departure from a state of perfect isolation, could that state ever have subsisted for a single day, is the patriarchal arrangement. No sooner indeed is the infant creature ushered into being, than it is met by the cares and the caresses of those who are around it, and who have either attended or welcomed its entry on this scene of existence as if, in very proportion to the extremity of its utter helplessness, was the strength of that security which nature hath provided, in the workings of the human constitution, for the protection of its weakness and the supply of all its little wants. That there should be hands to receive and to manage this tender visitant, is not more obviously a benevolent adaptation, than that there should be hearts to sympathize with its cries of impotency or distress. The maternal affection is as express an instance of this as the maternal nourishment-nor is the inference at all weakened, by the attempts, even though they should be successful, of those who would demonstrate of this universal fondness of mothers, that, instead of an original instinct, it is but a derived or secondary law of our nature. Were that analysis as distinct and satisfactory as it is doubtful

and obscure, which would resolve all mental phenomena into the single principle of association -still the argument would stand. A secondary law, if not the evidence of a distinct principle, requires at least distinct and peculiar circumstances for its development; and the right ordering of these for a beneficial result, is just as decisively the proof and the characteristic of a plan, as are the collocations of Anatomy. It might not have been necessary to endow matter with any new property for the preparation of a child's aliment in the breast of its mother-yet the framework of that very peculiar apparatus by which the milk is secreted, and the suckling's mouth provided with a duct of conveyance for the abstraction of it, is, in the many fitnesses of time and place and complicated arrangement, pregnant with the evidence of a designer's contrivance and a designer's care. And in like manner, though it should be established, that the affection of a mother for her young from the moment of their birth, instead of an independent principle in her nature, was the dependent product of remembrances and feelings which had accumulated during the period of gestation, and were at length fixed, amidst the agonies of parturition, into the strongest of all her earthly regardsthe argument for design is just as entire, though, instead of connecting it with the peculiarity of an original law, we connect it with the peculiarity of those circumstances which favour the development of this maternal feeling, in the form of a secondary law. There is an infinity of conceivable methods, by which the successive generations of men might

have risen into being; and our argument is entire, if, out of these, that method has been selected, whereof the result is an intense affection on the part of mothers for their offspring. It matters not whether this universal propensity of theirs be a primary instinct of nature, or but a resulting habit which can be traced to the process which they have been actually made to undergo, or the circumstances in which they have actually been placed. The ordination of this process, the mandate for the assemblage and collocation of these circumstances, gives as distinct and decisive indication of an ordaining mind, as would the establishment of any peculiar law. Let it suffice once for all to have said this-for if in the prosecution of our inquiry, we stopped at every turn to entertain the question, whether each beneficial tendency on which we reasoned, were an original or only a secondary principle in nature-we should be constantly rushing uncalled into the mists of obscurity; and fastening upon our cause an element of doubt and weakness, which in no wise belongs to it.

2. The other affections which enter into the composition, or rather, form the cement of a family, are more obviously of a derivative, and less obviously of an instinctive character, than is that strong maternal affinity which meets so opportunely with the extreme helplessness of its objects, that but for the succour and sympathy of those whose delight it is to cherish and sustain them, would perish in the infancy of their being. However questionable the analysis might be, which would resolve the universal fondness of mothers for their