THE

DUTIES OF MEN.

IN A SERIES OF SUBJECTS, ADDRESSED TO A YOUNG

FRIEND.

SECTION I.

ON THE NECESSITY AND VALUE OF DUTY.

It is impossible for the human mind to disengage itself from the idea of duty;-impossible for it not to feel and acknowledge the immense importance of such an idea. The sense of duty is irradicably attached to our very being; conscience warns us of its existence from the earliest dawn of reason, and it invariably grows with our growth as the reasoning powers expand. Every thing, without and around us, equally informs us of this truth, because every thing is governed by

B

one harmonious and eternal law;—every thing in unison has a destination to express the wisdom, and to effect the will of that Being who is the cause and the end of all things.

It follows that man, also, has a destination,a nature of his own. In conformity with this nature, it is necessary that he be that which he ought to be, or he is not esteemed by his kind,he is not esteemed by himself;—he is not happy. Yet it is his nature to aspire to happiness ;-to understand and to prove that he cannot attain it except by being virtuous ;-in other words, being that which his welfare, in unison with the system of the universe,-with the designs of God, demand that he should be.

If, in the hour of passion, we are tempted to call that our good which is opposed to the wellbeing of another, and to universal order, we are still unable to persuade ourselves that it is so; for conscience denies the assertion. When the passion ceases, the retrospect of what has injured the well-being of another, and disturbed general order, invariably excites a feeling of remorse and horror. The fulfilment of duty, then, is so far necessary to our welfare, that even the pains of death, which are thought the most imminent of human evils,

assume the aspect of a triumph in the mind of the truly noble, who know how to suffer and to die in the effort to save their neighbour, or to conform to the adorable designs of the Omnipotent.

In man, therefore, becoming that which he ought to be consists at once the definition of duty and that of happiness. Religion proclaims this truth sublimely, when it says, that he is made in the image of God. His duty and his happiness consist in his degree of likeness to that Image; in not desiring to be other than like; but to be good, because God is good, and has given to him the glorious capacity of elevating his soul to all the virtues, and to become, by so doing, even one with Himself. Is not here a heavenly destination worth suffering for, and struggling through severer difficulties than a brief mortal life can array against us?

SECTION II.

ON THE LOVE OF TRUTH.

Of all our duties, the love of truth, with faith and constancy in it, ranks first and highest. Truth is God. To love God and to love Truth are one and the same.

Awaken all your energies, my young friend, to wish for and to WILL the truth; never to permit yourself to be dazzled by the glare of that false eloquence, the boast of wild and melancholy sophists, eager to throw dark, distracting doubts upon every thing. Reason is of no utility, but rather injurious, when directed against truth-in order to depreciate it-to maintain ignoble views, or when it deduces consequences, tending to excite despair from the inevitable evils of this life, and by denying that life is a good. Insisting upon some apparent disorders in the universe, it refuses to acknowledge any system of order at all; when wounded by the palpability and the death of the body, it is shocked at the belief of an existence (the I am) wholly spiritual and immortal; when it considers the distinctions between vice and virtue as a mere dream, and when it likes to contemplate, in man, a something worse than wild beast, without a spark of divine mind.

Were man and nature, indeed, of so poor, so vile, so revolting a formation, why persist in losing our time in the pursuit of wisdom? By the same reasoning we might applaud the doctrine of suicide; but let us beware of such insidious approaches, and suspect those who themselves dread the doctrines which they dare to recommend.

Since conscience tells us that we ought to live (for the exception of a few weak intellects amounts to nothing); since we live to aspire after good; since we feel that the welfare of man consists in his not debasing himself into a worm, but in dignifying, and elevating his mind to God; it is clear there can be no sound use of reason except in so far as it presents to man a lofty idea of his own possible dignity, and impels him to seek its attainment.

This being once acknowledged, let us boldly cast away all scepticism, cynicism, and all other degrading systems of philosophy; let us bind ourselves to the belief of truth,—to the noble and the good. To have faith, it is necessary to wish to have faith; it is necessary to love ardently the truth. It is this love only which can inspire the soul with energy; he who can be content to languish in endless doubts, relaxes all the springs of mind.

To good faith in all right principles, add the determination of invariably presenting, in yourself, the expression of truth in all your words and in all your actions. Man's conscience can find no repose except in the bosom of truth. He who states a falsehood, even if undiscovered, bears his