A crowd of useful reflections upon this subject naturally offer, upon which it would be easy to enlarge.--The brevity of my plan impels me to other subjects. There is one quality, difficult to define, yet easily understood, which always affects us pleasantly. It is a quality as rare as its effects are useful; and yet we have scarcely a specific term in our language by which fully to designate it. An obliging disposition is the common phrase that conveys it. Examine all the pleasant things of life, and you will find this disposition the pleasantest of all. There often remains no memory of the benefits received. Of those we have rendered, something is always retained. But what shall we say of the ungrateful? We are told that they are formidable from their numbers and boldness, and that they people the whole earth. How eccentric and contradictory are the common maxims of the world! We admit that we have a right to exact gratitude; and yet wish that benefits should be forgotten: I hold it wrong to depend upon gratitude, since the expectation will generally be deceived.--On the contrary, I approve his course, who keeps an exact account of his good actions. In reading the record, he will one day taste a legitimate reward. What reading can be so useful? To remember that we have done good in time past, is to bind us to beneficence in time to come. We hear it continually repeated, that it requires a sublime effort to do good to our enemies.--Men more zealous than enlightened have advanced, that the morality of the gospel has alone prescribed the rendering of good for evil. Evangelical duty is sufficiently elevated by being founded on the basis of higher sanctions and a future retribution; and rests not its claims upon new discoveries of what is true, beautiful and obligatory in morals. They who advocate that the grand maxims of evangelical morality are found nowhere else than in the gospel, seem to me to have committed two faults; the one in advancing an error, the other in tending to estrange men from the virtues they inculcate, by intimating that their practice exacts more than human power. A writer of unquestionable piety, the late Sir William Jones found the grand maxim, ‘do unto others as you would wish them to do unto you,’ implied in the discourses of Lysias, Thales and Pittacus, and, word for word, in the original of Confucius. The obligation _to render good for evil_, he affirms, is inculcated in the religious books of the Hindoos and Arabians; in confirmation of which he cites many passages from them. The sentiment of moralists has everywhere been graven upon the human heart. It is enough that our Lord has sanctioned the sublime precepts that belong to our faith with immortal recompenses; and still more may we rely upon those sanctions, when we add to them the present pleasure of performing good actions.[27a]