Morality is natural, but its rules have been sanctioned by the rudest forms of religion. Whether our moral faculties depend upon a modification of reason, upon a moral sense, or upon some other principle of our nature, they carry with them the most evident badges of authority, and were plainly set up within us to superintend our passions and appetites and to be the supreme arbiters of our actions. They are described in religious language as the vice-regents of God within us; they never fail to punish sin by the torments of inward shame and self-condemnation; they reward obedience with tranquillity and contentment. Oncken thinks that Smith’s eloquent vindication of conscience helped to form Kant’s moral idealism; but it puts us more in mind of the Roman satirist’s great line— “Nocte dieque suum gestare in pectore testem.” Moral judgments likewise help to correct in some measure the course of this world. “The industrious knave cultivates the soil; the indolent good man leaves it uncultivated. Who ought to reap the harvest?” Here the natural course of things decides against the natural sentiments of mankind. Human laws therefore often punish the knave or traitor though industrious, and reward the good citizen though improvident. Thus man is by nature prompted to correct nature; but even so his endeavours are often impotent; the current is too strong. Our natural sentiments are often shocked. We see great combinations oppress small. We see the innocent suffer. Despairing of earthly forces to check the triumph of injustice, we naturally appeal to heaven, “and thus we are led to a belief in the future state by the love of virtue,” and moral rules acquire new sanctity by being regarded as the laws of an all-powerful Deity. As religion in this way enforces an innate sense of duty, mankind is generally disposed to place great confidence in the probity of those who seem to be deeply religious. And where religion has not been corrupted, “wherever men are not taught to regard frivolous observances, as more immediate duties of religion, than acts of justice and beneficence; and to imagine, that by sacrifices, and ceremonies, and vain supplications, they can bargain with the Deity for fraud, and perfidy, and violence, the world undoubtedly judges right in this respect, and justly places a double confidence in the rectitude of the religious man’s behaviour.”