Upon the culture, I say; upon what makes for human improvement. There is evil enough in the world; but what nation or age ever approved of it? What people ever praised selfishness, injustice, falsifying of speech or trust? No literature ever celebrated them. No religion ever enjoined them. No laws ever enacted them. Imagine a law that proposed to reward villains and to punish honest men. The world would spit upon it. Imagine a book or essay or poem or oration, that plainly set about to tell what a beautiful and noble thing it is, to lie, to defraud, to wrong, corrupt, and ruin our fellows. No man ever had the face to do such a thing. No; books may have taught such things, but they never taught them as noble things. The man never lived, that would stand up and say, "It is a glorious thing to betray trust, or to ruin one's country, or to blaspheme God." Men do such things, but they don't reverence nor respect themselves for doing them. This then being settled--and it is a stupendous fact--the right principle about culture, being thus set up, high and irrepealable in the human conscience and in the sentiments of all mankind--what says the common judgment of men about the happiness or misery of following the right? Does it say--"It is a blessed thing to be a bad man; it is good and wise to be a base or cruel man." Does it say--"Happy is the miser, the knave, the drunkard." No, it does not. There is temptation to do wrong; _that_ all know; there is a notion that it may promote some temporary interest or pleasure; there is a disposition in many, to prefer some sensual gratification to the purer satisfactions of the higher nature; but there is, at the same time, a deep-founded conviction, that misery in the long run must follow sin; that the everlasting law of God has so ordained it to _be_; and that only the pure, the noble, the heroic, the good and godlike affections can ever make such a nature as ours, content and happy.