NewThoughtLibrary.com / DivineLibrary.org

both to enjoyment and to action. In the first relation, they may as easily prey upon happiness as promote it; in the second, they can not fail of being productive of pleasure.

In the moral sensibilities, the sharpness and the bitterness of the selfish element disappear, and the benignity, composure and patience of a moral impulse take their place. It is the intermingling of so many kinds of feeling, and of the words applicable to them, which confound the character of action, and the classification of this department.

The direction in which the moral sensibilities find fullest play is that of religious sentiments. The relations and duties designated as religious are those which, by the feelings and the results involved, are fitted to act most powerfully on the conscience and affections. The religious emotions, therefore, seem at times to overshadow other forms of ethical action, since their intensity and scope bear some proportion to the interests covered by them to the ennobling, greatly stimulating presentations of the divine attributes. The foundation of religion is ethics, yet the ethical form is often swallowed up in the deep, spontaneous play of the religious affections. If we consider the permanent issues of happiness, of joy and peace, as settled in our own constitution by the moral sentiments, and the relations of actions under them; if we remember that nothing in our fellow-men is of more abiding interest to us than their character, than the moral purposes indicated, and line of conduct adopted; and, above all, if we bring to mind that the deepest, the supreme play of feeling is towards God, chiefly known to us as a moral being, we shall see that the class of sentiments now presented are at once the most varied, the most full, the most central and powerful of our emotions. So pervasive are they, that they give coloring to intellectual feelings which they cannot rule, enter in a fragmentary form where completeness is denied them, and