ts itself,
and approves or condemns him the doer of them accordingly: and which, if
not forcibly stopped, naturally and always of course goes on to
anticipate a higher and more effectual sentence, which shall hereafter
second and affirm its own. But this part of the office of conscience is
beyond my present design explicitly to consider. It is by this faculty,
natural to man, that he is a moral agent, that he is a law to himself,
but this faculty, I say, not to be considered merely as a principle in
his heart, which is to have some influence as well as others, but
considered as a faculty in kind and in nature supreme over all others,
and which bears its own authority of being so.

This _prerogative_, this _natural supremacy_, of the faculty which
surveys, approves, or disapproves the several affections of our mind and
actions of our lives, being that by which men _are a law to themselves_,
their conformity or disobedience to which law of our nature renders their
actions, in the highest and most proper sense, natural or unnatural, it
is fit it be further explained to you; and I hope it will be so, if you
will attend to the following reflections.

Man may act according to that principle or inclination which for the
present happens to be strongest, and yet act in a way disproportionate
to, and violate his real proper nature. Suppose a brute creature by any
bait to be allured into a snare, by which he is destroyed. He plainly
followed the bent of his nature, leading him to gratify his appetite:
there is an entire correspondence between his whole nature and such an
action: such action therefore is natural. But suppose a man, foreseeing
the same danger of certain ruin, should rush into it for the sake of a
present gratification; he in this instance would follow his strongest
desire, as did the brute creature; but there would be as manifest a
disproportion between the nature of a man and such an action as between
the meanest work of art and the skill of the greatest master in that art;
which disproportion arises, not from considering the action singly in
_itself_, or in its _consequences_, but from _comparison_ of it with the
nature of the agent. And since such an action is utterly
disproportionate to the nature of man, it is in the strictest and most
proper sense unnatural; this word expressing that disproportion.
Therefore, instead of the words _disproportionate to his nature_, the
word _unnatural_ may now be put; thi