On the Foundation of Morals . . .

From: The Dial, Vol. II No. IV (April 1842)
Author:
Published: E. P. Peabody 1842 Boston

  On the Foundation of Morals: four Sermons preached before the University of Cambridge. By the Rev. WILLIAM WHEWELL, & c. 2d Edition. Cambridge and London, (no date.) 8vo. pp. xi. and 76.

  These four Sermons—which are very respectable discourses, better suited to the pulpit than the press—are designed to recall men to the eternal foundation of our ideas of the good and true, and to the absolute, and therefore immutable Morality, which rests thereon. They are at war, in part, with the system of Paley, of whom he thus speaks in the preface, p. v. “The evils which arise from the countenance thus afforded to the principles of Paley’s system, (namely, by making his Moral Philosophy the standard in the University,) are so great, as to make it desirable for us to withdraw our sanction from his doctrines without further delay, although I am not at present aware of any system of ethics constructed on a sounder basis, which I should recommend to the adoption of the University.” He refers often to Butler, as the exponent of a system diametrically opposite to that of Paley, and refers chiefly to Butler’s first three Sermons, on Human Nature; the fifth and sixth, on Compassion; the eighth and ninth, on Resentment; the eleventh and twelfth, on the Love of our Neighbor; and the thirteenth and fourteenth, on the Love of God, as expressing the sounder view of man’s moral nature, and duties which result therefrom. The substance of the Sermons is this: God has written his law eternally on the constitution of man; conscience is man’s power to read that law; duty is obedience to it. Of course it follows from such premises and their implications, that man may obey completely, and in that case, both in this world and the next, obtains the highest possible human welfare. But here the author’s theology comes in, and mars the work in some measure, and he concludes as follows: “Conscience is His minister; the law of the heart is his writing; the demand for the obedience of thought and will is his word, and yet how small a part is this of that vast dispensation, by which the sting of death, which is sin, was plucked out, and the strength of sin, which is the law, [the law of Moses, however, not the law of God,] was tamed, and the victory was won for us; and the conqueror, ‘having spoiled principalities and powers, made a show of them, triumphing openly,’ and Death and Sin, and the law of Moses, and the law of Nature, [the law of God?] all become only as figures belonging to the triumphal procession.” This is eloquent and full of pious feeling, but it is rhetoric, not philosophy. The book well deserves reprinting with us, and carries the reader back to the times of the “Latitude men about Cambridge,” when there were giants in that University, and “immutable morality” was taught by men, wont to

men who believed goodness and God were to be loved for their own sake.

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