that which is accounted wicked, society could scarcely go on; and certainly the feelings and thoughts and characters of men could not be what they are. Those impulses of nature which involve no acknowledgment of responsibility, and the play and struggle of interfering wishes, might preserve the species in some shape of existence, as we see in the case of brutes. But a person must be strangely constituted, who, living amid the respect for law, the admiration for what is good, the order and virtues and graces of civilized nations, (all which have their origin in some degree in the feeling of responsibility) can maintain that all these are casual and extraneous circumstances, no way contemplated in the formation of man; and that a condition in which there should be obligation in law, no merit in self-restraint, no beauty in virtue, is equally suited to the powers and the nature of man, and was equally contemplated when those powers were given him. If this supposition be too extravagant to be admitted, as it appears to be, it remains then that man, intended, as we have already seen from his structure and properties, to be a discoursing, social being, acting under the influence of affections, desires, and purposes, was also intended to act under the influence of a sense of duty; and that the acknowledgment of the obligation of a moral law is as much part of his nature, as hunger or thirst, maternal love or the desire of power; that, therefore, in conceiving man as the work of a Creator, we must imagine his powers and character given him with an intention on the Creator’s part that this sense of duty should occupy its place in his constitution as an active and thinking being: and that this directive and judiciary principle is a part of the work of the same Author who made the elements to minister to the material functions, and the arrangements of the world to occupy the individual and social affections of his living creatures. This principle of conscience, it may further be observed, does not stand upon the same level as the other impulses of our constitution by which we are prompted or restrained. By its very nature and essence, it possesses a supremacy over all others. “Your obligation to obey this law is its being the law of your nature. That your conscience approves of and attests such a course of action is itself alone an obligation. Conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way we should walk in, but it likewise carries its own authority with it, that it is our natural guide: the guide assigned us by the author of our nature.”[26] That we ought to do an action, is of itself a sufficient and ultimate answer to the questions, _why_ we should do it?--how we are _obliged_ to do it? The conviction of duty implies the soundest reason, the strongest obligation, of which our nature is susceptible.