There are, again, proverbs which, from another point of view, might seem of an ignoble cast, and as calculated to lower the tone of morality among those who received them; proposing as they do secondary, and therefore unworthy, motives to actions, which ought to be performed out of the highest. I mean such as this: _Honesty is the best policy_; wherein honesty is commended, not because it is right, but because it is most prudent and politic, and has the promise of this present world. Now doubtless there are proverbs not a few which, like this, move in the region of what has been by Coleridge so well called “prudential morality;” and did we accept them as containing the whole circle of motives to honesty or other right conduct, nothing could be worse, or more fitted to lower the moral standard of our lives. He who resolves to be honest because, and only because, it is _the best policy_, will be little likely long to continue honest at all. But the proverb does not pretend to usurp the place of an ethical rule; it does not presume to cast down the higher law which should determine to honesty and uprightness, that it may put itself in its place; it only declares that honesty, let alone that it is the right thing, is also, even for this present world, the wisest. Nor dare we, let me further add, despise prudential morality, such as is embodied in sayings like this. The motives which it suggests are helps to a weak and tempted virtue, may prove great assistances to it in some passing moment of a violent temptation, however little they can be regarded as able to make men _for a continuance_ even outwardly upright and just.