than by citing the judgment of persons who appear to have given great attention to the subject, and to be well qualified to form a true opinion about it.  Boerhaave, speaking of this very declaration of our Saviour, “Whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her, hath already committed adultery with her in his heart,” and understanding it, as we do, to contain an injunction to lay the check upon the thoughts, was wont to say that “our Saviour knew mankind better than Socrates.”  Hailer, who has recorded this saying of Boerhaave, adds to it the following remarks of his own:—­(Letters to his Daughter.) “It did not escape the observation of our Saviour that the rejection of any evil thoughts was the best defence against vice:  for when a debauched person fills his imagination with impure pictures, the licentious ideas which he recalls fail not to stimulate his desires with a degree of violence which he cannot resist.  This will be followed by gratification, unless some external obstacle should prevent him from the commission of a sin which he had internally resolved on.”  “Every moment of time,” says our author, “that is spent in meditations upon sin increases the power of the dangerous object which has possessed our imagination.”  I suppose these reflections will be generally assented to.

III.  Thirdly, had a teacher of morality been asked concerning a general principle of conduct, and for a short rule of life; and had he instructed the person who consulted him, “constantly to refer his actions to what he believed to be the will of his Creator, and constantly to have in view not his own interest and gratification alone, but the happiness and comfort of those about him,” he would have been thought, I doubt not, in any age of the world, and in any, even the most improved state of morals, to have delivered a judicious answer; because, by the first direction, he suggested the only motive which acts steadily and uniformly, in sight and out of sight, in familiar occurrences and under pressing temptations; and in the second he corrected what of all tendencies in the human character stands most in need of correction, selfishness, or a contempt of other men’s conveniency and satisfaction.  In estimating the value of a moral rule, we are to have regard not only to the particular duty, but the general spirit; not only to what it directs us to do, but to the character which a compliance with its direction is likely to form in us.  So, in the present instance, the rule here recited will never fail to make him who obeys it considerate not only of the rights, but of the feelings of other men, bodily and mental, in great matters and in small; of the ease, the accommodation, the self-complacency of all with whom he has any concern, especially of all who are in his power, or dependent upon his will.

Now what, in the most applauded philosopher of the most enlightened age of the world, would have been deemed worthy of his wisdom, and of his character, to say, our Saviour hath said, and upon just such an occasion as that which we have feigned.