The truth, as Smith conceived it, is that men are actuated at different times by different motives, benevolent, selfish, or mixed. The moral criterion of an action is: will it help society, will it benefit others, will it be approved by the Impartial Spectator? The economic criterion of an action is: will it benefit me, will it be profitable, will it increase my income? Smith built his theory of industrial and commercial life upon the assumption that wage-earners and profit-makers are generally actuated by the desire to get as high wages and profits as possible. If this is not the general and predominant motive in one great sphere of activity, the production and distribution of wealth, the _Wealth of Nations_ is a vain feat of the imagination, and political economy is not a dismal science but a dismal fiction. But there is nothing whatever either to excite surprise or to suggest inconsistency in the circumstance that a philosopher, who (to adopt the modern jargon of philosophy) distinguished between self-regarding and other-regarding emotions, should have formed the first group into a system of economics and the second into a system of ethics. If this comes of learning, an even more extravagant charge has been preferred by an emotional school. A heated imagination, certainly not encumbered with facts, and informed only that Adam Smith was the founder of an odious science, denounced him as “the half-bred and half-witted Scotchman” who taught “the deliberate blasphemy”—“Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God, damn His Laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods.” The same authority declares that he “formally, in the name of the philosophers of Scotland, set up this opposite God, on the hill of cursing against blessing, Ebal against Gerizim”—a God who “allows usury, delights in strife and contention, and is very particular about everybody’s going to his synagogue on Sunday.”[34] These three characteristics of Adam Smith’s deity were unfortunately chosen; for, as it happens, he disliked usury so much that he defended the laws which had vainly sought to prevent high rates of interest; disapproved vehemently of war, which he regarded as one of the deadliest enemies of human progress, and protested against the idea that a perfect Deity could possibly desire His creatures to abase themselves before Him. It is sad to think that to get his gold the Ruskinian must pass so much sand through his mind. The _Fors Clavigera_, with all its passionate intensity and high-strung emotion, is a standing warning to preachers not to abuse their masters, and to learn a subject before they teach it. Let those who climb so recklessly on Ebal deliver their curses from a safer foothold.