CHAPTER I.
Great Object of the System.
THE man who lives for himself, may be of some use to others as he passes through life; for God has so constituted things, that even selfishness cannot attain its highest aims without benefiting others. The man who lives for his country, will do good on a wide scale, and have the evening of his days cheered by enviable recollections; but he who lives for man, for the whole world, is the highest benefactor to his race, the noblest specimen of man, and the brightest exhibition of the christian.
Whether men have received or denied the account of the entrance of sin into this world, as given by Moses, all have readily acknowledged that there has been a great collapse in the human character; that by some means or other, man is not what he was when he came from the hands of his Creator. And the great problem with the most enlightened of men has been, to devise some means by which the moral character of man may be raised, a lever so simple that it can be applied to any character. however low, and one which shall be unaffected by time or circumstances. For four thousand years the world was left to the guidance of unaided reason; and while a very small portion of the human race was receiving a revelation from Heaven, the great mass were left to work out this problem for themselves. The result was, that the whole world degenerated; darkness covered the earth, and gross darkness the people. Every part of the world, and every class of men, were debased and sunken; and vices became great and common beyond our belief, were it not that darkness still covers the earth, and the dark places of the earth are still too full of the habitations of cruelty to permit us to doubt the records of ancient crime.