mighty and so absolute, he is confided in as a being who will never violate any moral principle or affection? Suppose God's will to be necessitated in its wise and good volitions,--the sun dispensing heat and light, and by their agency unfolding and revealing the beauty of creation, seems as truly excellent and worthy of gratitude,--and the creature, exercising gratitude towards God and confiding in him, holds no other relation to him than the sunflower to the sun--by a necessity of its nature, ever turning its face upwards to receive the influences which minister to its life and properties. The moral certainty attending the volitions of created perfect beings is the same in kind with that attending the volitions of the Deity. It is a certainty based upon the relative state of the reason and the sensitivity, and their unity with the will. Wherever the reason and the sensitivity are in harmony, there is moral certainty. I mean by this, that in calculating the character of future volitions in this case, we have not to calculate the relative energy of opposing principles:--all which is now existent is, in the constituted unity of the soul, naturally connected only with good volitions. But the _degree_ of the moral certainty in created beings, when compared with that attending the volitions of Deity, is only in the proportion of the finite to the infinite. The confidence which we repose in the integrity of a good being, does not arise from the conviction that his volitions are necessitated, but from his known habit of obeying truth and justice; and our sense of his meritoriousness does not arise from the impossibility of his doing wrong, but from his known determination and habit of doing right while having the power of doing wrong, and while even under temptations of doing wrong. A certainty respecting volitions, if based upon the necessity of the volitions, would not differ from a physical certainty. But a moral certainty has this plain distinction,--that it is based upon the evidently pure dispositions and habits of the individual, without implying, however, any necessity of volitions. Moral certainty, then, is predicable only of moral perfection, and predicable in degrees according to the dignity and excellency of the being. But now let us suppose any disorder to take place in the sensitivity; that is, let us suppose the sensitivity, to any degree, to grow into opposition to the reason, so that while the reason commands in one direction, the sensitivity gives the sense of the most agreeable in the opposite direction,--and then our calculations respecting future volitions must vary accordingly. Here moral certainty exists no longer, because volitions are now to be calculated in connexion with opposing principles: calculations now attain only to the probable, and in different degrees.