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the facts may be, whether physical or moral, they always spring from
causes; there are causes for ambition, for courage, for veracity, as
well as for digestion, for muscular action, and for animal heat. Vice
and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar; every complex fact
grows out of the simple facts with which it is affiliated and on
which it depends. We must therefore try to ascertain what simple facts
underlie moral qualities the same as we ascertain those that underlie
physical qualities, and, for example, let us take the first fact
that comes to hand, a religious system of music, that of a Protestant
church. A certain inward cause has inclined the minds of worshipers
toward these grave, monotonous melodies, a cause much greater than its
effect; that is to say, a general conception of the veritable outward
forms of worship which man owes to God; it is this general conception
which has shaped the architecture of the temple, cast out statues,
dispensed with paintings, effaced ornaments, shortened ceremonies,
confined the members of a congregation to high pews which cut off the
view, and governed the thousand details of decoration, posture, and
all other externals. This conception itself again proceeds from a
more general cause, an idea off human conduct in general, inward and
outward, prayers, actions, dispositions of every sort that man is
bound to maintain toward the Deity; it is this which has enthroned the
doctrine of grace, lessened the importance of the clergy, transformed
the sacraments, suppressed observances, and changed the religion of
discipline into one of morality. This conception, in its turn, depends
on a third one, still more general, that of moral perfection as this
is found in a perfect God, the impeccable judge, the stern overseer,
who regards every soul as sinful, meriting punishment, incapable of
virtue or of salvation, except through a stricken conscience which He
provokes and the renewal of the heart which He brings about. Here is
the master conception, consisting of duty erected into the absolute
sovereign of human life, and which prostrates all other ideals at the
feet of the moral ideal. Here we reach what is deepest in man; for, to
explain this conception, we must consider the race he belongs to,
say the German, the Northman, the formation and character of his
intellect, his ways in general of thinking and feeling, that tardiness
and frigidity of sensation which keeps him from rashly an