Again, vices which have a known influence in disturbing the relations of society are in various ways opposed by the more _public_ influence of religion. So that in the end a man finds—although he may arrive at the conclusion, only by exhausting all other views before he hits on those which lead to it—that honesty is as good a way of getting on as any other; or he may advance perhaps even on this utilitarian creed so far as to agree with Tillotson: that people take more trouble to get to Hell, than would suffice to carry them to Heaven. The immoralities of trades and professions lie in a very different position, and involve peculiarities which favour their growth and perpetuity. They are committed in secret;—people are proverbially cautious of attacking the weak positions of others, who feel that their own are ill-defended. This, and the established manœuvres of each calling, enable an individual to do a good deal "off his own bat," without, as one of our bishops happily expressed it, "being caught out." In trade we are sometimes informed that a thing cannot be sold cheaper; that the price asked is already less than the cost; and people are appropriately addressed as idiots, who every day appear to believe that which common sense shows to be impossible. Your purveyors will sometimes tell you that they are not living by the prices they charge; although you have just ascertained that the same article may be bought at infinitely less cost in the next market. The other day, a watchmaker told us that our watch wanted a good deal of looking to, and, amongst other things, "no doubt cleaning;" but this he discovered, we suppose, by some recondite mesmeric process in a book, which recorded when it had been cleaned last, without looking at the watch at all. As regards professions, lawyers are said to defend right and wrong with indiscriminate avidity, with the encouraging prospect of obtaining more fruit in maintaining one wrong cause, than establishing twenty right. Then the _real nature_ of these things is, like too many in other sciences, obscured by a cloudy nomenclature. We hear of "customs of the trade," "secrets of the trade," or "profession," applied to things which the moralist only recognizes under very different designations. Sophisms thus secured, and which appear to minister to a man's interests, have their true colours developed with difficulty; to say nothing of it not being easy to discover that which there is no desire to examine.