templation. Let us see a man who has done a murderous act, in the circumstances which we have just now specified; and we do not look upon him as a criminal, because we find that the act originated in the will of others and against his own will. Let us see a man who has done a murderous act, and was instigated thereto by a murderous disposition, and we cannot help looking upon him as a criminal-finding as we do that the act originated in his own will. An act against the will indicates no demerit on the part of him who performed it. But an act with the will gives us the full impression of demerit. The philosopher may query, What was it

amuse himself with the ulterior that originated the will? But the peasant has no metaphysics and no speculation for entertaining such a topic-And yet he has just as fresh and just as enlightened a sense of the demerit of a bad action coming from a bad intention, as the most curious and contemplative enquirer has-whose careless appetite is ever carrying him upward among the remote and hidden principles of the phenomena that are around him. To get a right moral estimate of any given act, we must carry our view up from the act of the hand to the disposition of the heart; but we need to carry it up no farther. The moment that the disposition is seen, the moral sense is correspondingly affected; and rests its whole estimation, whether of merit or of demerit, not on the anterior cause which gave origin to the disposition, but on the character which it now bears, or the aspect under which it is now seen and contemplated before you.

How the disposition got there is not the question, which the moral sense of man, when he is unvitiated by a taste for speculation, takes any concern in. It is enough for the moral sense, that the disposition is there. One may conceive, with the Manicheans of old, two eternal Beings-one of whom was essentially wicked and malignant and impure, and the other of whom was essentially good and upright and compassionate and holy from everlasting. We could not tell how these opposite dispositions got there, for there they behoved to be from the unfathomable depths of the eternity that is behind us yet that would not hinder us from regarding the one as an object of moral hatefulness and dislike, and the other as an object of moral esteem and moral approbation. It is enough that the dispositions exist; and it matters not how they originated, or if ever they had an origin at all. And, in like manner, give us two human individuals-one of whom is revengeful and dishonest and profligate and sensual, and the other of whom is kind and generous and honourable and godly-Our moral sense on the simple exhibition of these two characters, leads us to regard the one as blameable and the other as praiseworthy-the one as rightly the object of condemnation and punishment, and the other as rightly the object of approval and reward. And in so doing, it does not look so far back, as to the primary or originating cause of the distinction that obtains between these two characters. It looks as far back, as to reach its contemplation from the act of the outer man to the disposition of the inner man; but there it stops. Give to its view a wrong

act originating in a wrong intention; and it asks no more to make up its estimate of the criminality of what has been offered to its notice. It troubles not itself with the metaphysics of prior and originating causes; and, however the deed in question may have originated, let it simply have emanated from a concurring disposition on the part of him who has performed it, and be a deed of wickedness -then does it conclude that the man has done wickedly and that he should be dealt with accordingly. We know very well what it is, that stumbles so readily the speculative enquirer into this mystery. He thinks that a man born with a sinful disposition, is born with the necessity of sinning; and that to be under such a necessity, exempts him from all blame, and all imputation of guiltiness in having sinned. But so long as he is under this feeling, he is in fact, though not very conscious of the delusion, he is in fact confounding two things which are distinct the one from the other. He is confounding the necessity that is against the will, with the necessity that is with the will. The man who struggled against the external force, that compelled him to thrust a dagger into the bosom of his friend, was operated upon by a necessity that was against his will; and you exempt him from all charge of criminality in the matter. But the man who does the very same thing at the spontaneous bidding of his own heart whose will prompted him to the act, and who gave his consent and his choice to this deed of enormity-this he man whom you irresistibly condemn, and you istibly recoil from. With such a disposition

as he had, it was perhaps unavoidable; but the very having of such a disposition, makes him in your eye a monster of moral deformity. If there was a kind of necessity here, it was a necessity of an essentially different sort from the one we have just now specified, and ought therefore not to be confounded with it. It is necessity with the will, and not against it; and by the law both of God and man, the act he has committed is a crime and he is treated as a criminal.

The only necessity which excuses a man for doing what is evil, is a necessity that forces him by an external violence to do it, against the bent of his will struggling most honestly and determinedly to resist it. But if it be with the bent of the will, if the necessity he lies under of doing the evil thing consists in this, that his will is strongly and determinedly bent upon the doing of it—then such a necessity as this, so far from extenuating the man's guiltiness, just aggravates it the more, and stamps upon it, in all plain moral estimation, a character of fouller atrocity. For set before us two murderers, and the one of them differing from the other in the keenness and intensity of his thirst for blood. We have already evinced to you, how there is one species of necessity which extinguishes the criminality of the act altogether-even that necessity which operates with violence upon the muscles of the body, and overbears the moral desires and tendency of the mind. But there is another species of necessity, which heightens the criminality of murder-even that necessity, which lies in the taste and tendency of the mind towards this deed of

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