I lay down as a first principle, that in all societies, great or small, it is the duty of every member of it to be good, that virtue ought to be encouraged, vice discountenanced, the laws obeyed, and the transgressors punished. After this I affirm, that if we consult history, both ancient and modern, and take a view of what has passed in the world, we shall find that human nature, since the fall of Adam, has always been the same, and that the strength and frailties of it have ever been conspicuous in one part of the globe or other, without any regard to ages, climates, or religion. I never said, nor imagined, that man could not be virtuous as well in a rich and mighty kingdom, as in the most pitiful commonwealth; but I own it is my sense, that no society can be raised into such a rich and mighty kingdom, or so raised, subsist in their wealth and power for any considerable time, without the vices of man. This, I imagine, is sufficiently proved throughout the book; and as human nature still continues the same, as it has always been for so many thousand years, we have no great reason to suspect a future change in it, while the world endures. Now, I cannot see what immorality there is in showing a man the origin and power of those passions, which so often, even unknowingly to himself, hurry him away from his reason; or that there is any impiety in putting him upon his guard against himself, and the secret stratagems of self-love, and teaching him the difference between such actions as proceed from a victory over the passions, and those that are only the result of a conquest which one passion obtains over another; that is, between real and counterfeited virtue. It is an admirable saying of a worthy divine, That though many discoveries have been made in the world of self-love, there is yet abundance of terra incognita left behind. What hurt do I do to man, if I make him more known to himself than he was before? But we are all so desperately in love with flattery, that we can never relish a truth that is mortifying, and I do not believe that the immortality of the soul, a truth broached long before Christianity, would have ever found such a general reception in human capacities as it has, had it not been a pleasing one, that extolled, and was a compliment to the whole species, the meanest and most miserable not excepted.