In one of the most important matters connected with the welfare of men, that of practical ethics, we have another example of the despotism of the mechanical and disregard of the vital, in human life. A true writer on morals should understand two things, morality and immorality; but a mechanical mind can do neither. He neither communicates the life of moral ideas, nor discerns the life of vicious ideas, but simply has opinions on morals, and opinions on vice. The consequence is that most of the “do-me-good” books are lifeless as regards effect—are contemptuously abandoned by men to children, and by children are learned only to be violated. At last it becomes the sign of green juvenility to quote an abstract truism against a concrete vice, and no person in active life considers himself at all bound to accommodate his conduct to axioms. Indeed, common writers on ethics have become unenviably notorious for expending the full force of their feebleness in statements of generalities, which are universally assented to, and almost as universally disregarded. Complacently perched on the chill summits of abstract principles, these gentlemen appear to experience a grim satisfaction in sending down into the warm and living concrete a storm of axiomatic snow and sleet. Having no practical grasp of things, they emphasize duties without possessing any clear insight of practices, and accordingly their indignant blast of truism whistles shrilly over the heads of the sinners it should lay prostrate. Wanting the power to pass into the substance and soul of existing objects and living men, they content themselves with applying external rules to external appearances, glory in the gift of invective as divorced from the secret of interpretation, and being thus shrews rather than seers, they do that worst of injuries to the cause of morality which results from denouncing the devil without understanding his deviltry. In the republic of delusion and democracy of transgression there are certain errors deserving the name of “popular,” errors which mislead three quarters of the human race; and the analysis and exhibition of these should be a leading object of practical morality. Thoroughly to comprehend one of these impish emissaries of Satan, and clearly to demonstrate that the rainbow bubbles he sports in the sun are begotten by froth on emptiness, might not be so grand a thing as to strut about in the worn-out frippery of moral commonplaces, but it would expose one fatal fallacy which assists in misguiding public sentiment, distorting human character, and impelling reasonable men into those expeditions after the unreal, which are every day wrecked on the rocks of nonsense or crime. But to do this requires a vital mind, and in matters of morals society is very well content not to be pricked and probed in conscience by the sharp benevolence of truth. The mechanical moralists disturb no robber or murderer, no cheat or miser, no spendthrift or profligate, no man who