Christian Ethics; Or, Moral Philosophy on the Principles of Divine Revelation

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. THE SAME SUBJECT CONTINUED. 1 TIM. VI. 20. textit{Science falsely so called. Lect in. The same general principle of objection, which, in the close of last lecture, was applied to the moral systems of the Aristotelian, the Stoical, and the Epicurean schools, that, namely, derived from the present fallen state of human nature, as both rendering that nature a deceitful standard of moral goodness, and the possessor of it a corrupt and prejudiced judge, we now proceed to consider in its application to certain other systems of more modern origin, though some of them bearing resemblance, in their leading principles, to one or other of the systems of antiquity. 4. sy.tem of I begin with the system which resolves virtue Cudworth, Clarke, and into agreement with The Eternal Fitnesses Priee. n Of Things. To enter at large into illustration of the principles of this system, as introduced by Cudworth, and ably taken up and defended byClarke and Price, would be foreign to my pre- Lect. in. sent purpose. It is only necessary to state them so far as to make the bearing of my general objection manifest. According to it, then, the right and wrong of actions are to be regarded as ranking amongst necessary or first truths, which are discerned by the mind, independently of all reasoning or evidence; so that the perception of right or wrong, along with the consequent sentiment of approbation or disapprobation, is as unavoidable as the perception of the truth or falsehood of self-evident propositions, propositions which are never obscured more than by attempts to prove them, and which we believe, simply because we cannot but believe them. The system maintains an absolute and eternal distinction between right and wrong, a distinction which the mind intu...