ntlemanlike.

Such a doctrine is essentially superficial, and such will be its effects.
It has no better measure of right and wrong than that of visible beauty
and tangible fitness. Conscience indeed inflicts an acute pang, but that
pang, forsooth, is irrational, and to reverence it is an illiberal
superstition. But, if we will make light of what is deepest within us,
nothing is left but to pay homage to what is more upon the surface. To
_seem_ becomes to _be_; what looks fair will be good, what causes offence
will be evil; virtue will be what pleases, vice what pains. As well may we
measure virtue by utility as by such a rule. Nor is this an imaginary
apprehension; we all must recollect the celebrated sentiment into which a
great and wise man was betrayed, in the glowing eloquence of his
valediction to the spirit of chivalry. "It is gone," cries Mr. Burke;
"that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a
stain like a wound; which inspired courage, while it mitigated ferocity;
which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which _vice lost half its
evil by losing all its grossness_." In the last clause of this beautiful
sentence we have too apt an illustration of the ethical temperament of a
civilized age. It is detection, not the sin, which is the crime; private
life is sacred, and inquiry into it is intolerable; and decency is virtue.
Scandals, vulgarities, whatever shocks, whatever disgusts, are offences of
the first order. Drinking and swearing, squalid poverty, improvidence,
laziness, slovenly disorder, make up the idea of profligacy: poets may say
any thing, however wicked, with impunity; works of genius may be read
without danger or shame, whatever their principles; fashion, celebrity,
the beautiful, the heroic, will suffice to force any evil upon the
community. The splendours of a court, and the charms of good society, wit,
imagination, taste, and high breeding, the _prestige_ of rank, and the
resources of wealth, are a screen, an instrument, and an apology for vice
and irreligion. And thus at length we find, surprising as the change may
be, that that very refinement of Intellectualism, which began by repelling
sensuality, ends by excusing it. Under the shadow indeed of the Church,
and in its due development, Philosophy does service to the cause of
morality; but, when it is strong enough to have a will of its own, and is
lifted up with an idea of its own importance, and attempts to form a
theo