was an amiable
weakness! At this time the profanation of the word "love" rose to its
height; the muse of science condescended to seek admission at the
saloons of fashion and frivolity, rouged like a harlot and with the
harlot's wanton leer. I know not how the annals of guilt could be better
forced into the service of virtue than by such a comment on the present
paragraph as would be afforded by sentimental correspondence produced in
courts of justice, fairly translated into the true meaning of the words,
and the actual object and purpose of the infamous writers.

Do you in good earnest aim at dignity of character? I conjure you, turn
away from those who live in the twilight between vice and virtue. Are
not reason, discrimination, law, and deliberate choice the
distinguishing characters of humanity? Can anything manly proceed from
those who for law and light would substitute shapeless feelings,
sentiments, impulses, which, as far as they differ from the vital
workings in the brute animals, owe the difference to their former
connection with the proper virtues of humanity? Remember that love
itself, in its highest earthly bearing, as the ground of the marriage
union, becomes love by an inward fiat of the will, by a completing and
sealing act of moral election, and lays claim to permanence only under
the form of duty.

All things strive to ascend, and ascend in the striving. While you
labour for anything below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in
the region of death.

Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!

_III.--PRUDENTIAL APHORISMS_

With respect to any final aim or end, the greater part of mankind live
at hazard. They have no certain harbour in view, nor direct their course
by any fixed star. But to him that knoweth not the port to which he is
bound, no wind can be favourable; neither can he who has not yet
determined at what mark he is to shoot, direct his arrow aright.

It is not, however, the less true that there is a proper object to aim
at; and if this object be meant by the term happiness, the perfection of
which consists in the exclusion of all hap [_i.e.,_ chance], I assert
that there is such a thing as _summum bonum_, or ultimate good. What
this is, the Bible alone shows certainly, and points out the way. "In
Cicero and Plato," says Augustine, "I meet with many things acutely
said, and things that excite a certain warmth of emotion, but in none of
them