3. On this theory, it is said, an individual may become perfectly good and perfectly bad, for any indefinite number of instances, in any definite period of time. This consequence, to say nothing of what is likely to take place in fact, does, as far as possibility is concerned, follow from this theory. But let us contemplate it, for a moment, in the light of an example or two. An individual, from regard to moral obligation, maintains perfect integrity of character, up to a given period of time. Then, under the influence of temptation, he tells a deliberate falsehood. Did his previous integrity so fuse itself into that lie, as to make it partly good and partly bad?—as to make it anything else than a total falsehood? Did the prior goodness of David make his acts of adultery and murder partly good and partly bad? Let the advocate of mixed moral action extract the elements of moral goodness from these acts if he can. He can just as well find these elements here, as in any other acts of disobedience to the Moral law. “The righteousness of the righteous cannot save him” from total sinfulness, any more than from condemnation “in the day of his transgression.”

CHAPTER XI.

RELATION OF THE WILL TO THE INTELLIGENCE AND SENSIBILITY, IN ALL ACTS OR STATES, MORALLY RIGHT OR WRONG.

The Will, sustaining the relation it does to the Intelligence and Sensibility, must yield itself to the control of one or the other of these departments of our nature. In all acts and states morally right, the Will is in harmony with the Intelligence, from respect to moral obligation or duty; and all the desires and propensities, all the impulses of the Sensibility, are held in strict subordination. In all acts morally wrong, the Will is controlled by the Sensibility, irrespective of the dictates of the Intelligence. Impulse, and not a regard to the just, the right, the true and the good, is the law of its action. In all such cases, as the impulses which control the Will are various, the external forms through which the internal acts, or intentions, will manifest themselves, will be equally diversified. Yet the spring of action is in all instances one and the same, impulse instead of a regard to duty. Virtue does not consist in being controlled by amiable, instead of dissocial and malign impulses, and in a consequent exterior of a corresponding beauty and loveliness. It consists in a voluntary harmony of intention with the just, the right, the true and the good from a sacred respect to moral obligation, instead of being controlled by mere impulse of any kind whatever. On the principle above illustrated, I remark: