Another characteristic of this law is not less original or less urgent: it places God, and man's duties towards God, at the head and front of man's life and man's duties; it unites intimately religion and morality, and regards them as inseparable. If philosophers, in studying, discriminate between them; if they seek in human nature the special principle or principles of morality; if they consider the latter by itself and apart from religion, it is the right of science to do so. But still the result is but a scientific work--only a partial dissection of man's soul, addressed to only one part of its faculties, and holding no account of the entirety and the reality of the soul's life. The Human Body, taken as one whole, is by nature at once moral and religious; the moral law that he finds in himself needs an author and a judge; and God is to him the source and guarantee, the Alpha and Omega of morality. A metaphysician may, from time to time, affirm the moral law, and yet forget its Divine Author. A man may, now and then, admit, may respect the principles of morality, and yet remain estranged from religion; all this is possible, for all this we see. {186} So small a portion of Truth sometimes satisfies the human mind! Man is so ready and so prone to misconceive and to mutilate himself! His ideas are by nature so incomplete and inconsequent, so easily dimmed or perverted by his Passions or the action of his free will! These are but the exceptional conditions of the human mind, mere scientific abstractions; if men admit them, their influence is neither general nor durable. In the natural and actual life of the human race, Morality and Religion are necessarily united; and it is one of the divine characteristics of the Decalogue, as it is also one of the causes of that authority which has remained to it after the lapse of so many centuries, that it has proclaimed and taken as its foundation their intimate union. This is not the place to consider the laws of Moses in civil and penal matters, nor to refer to his ordinances respecting the worship, or to those that regard the organization of the priesthood of the Hebrews. In the former of these two branches of the Mosaic code, numerous dispositions, singularly moral, equitable, and humane, are found in connection with circumstances indicating a state of manners gross and cruel even to barbarism. {187}