Of this the ingenious author of the Discourse Concerning the Nature of Man has given me a late instance, to mention no other.  For the civility of his expressions, and the candour that belongs to his order, forbid me to think that he would have closed his Preface with an insinuation, as if in what I had said, Book ii. ch. xxvii, concerning the third rule which men refer their actions to, I went about to make virtue vice and vice virtue, unless he had mistaken my meaning; which he could not have done if he had given himself the trouble to consider what the argument was I was then upon, and what was the chief design of that chapter, plainly enough set down in the fourth section and those following.  For I was there not laying down moral rules, but showing the original and nature of moral ideas, and enumerating the rules men make use of in moral relations, whether these rules were true or false:  and pursuant thereto I tell what is everywhere called virtue and vice; which “alters not the nature of things,” though men generally do judge of and denominate their actions according to the esteem and fashion of the place and sect they are of.

If he had been at the pains to reflect on what I had said, Bk.  I. ch. ii. sect. 18, and Bk.  II. ch. xxviii. sect. 13, 14, 15 and 20, he would have known what I think of the eternal and unalterable nature of right and wrong, and what I call virtue and vice.  And if he had observed that in the place he quotes I only report as a matter of fact what others call virtue and vice, he would not have found it liable to any great exception.  For I think I am not much out in saying that one of the rules made use of in the world for a ground or measure of a moral relation is—­that esteem and reputation which several sorts of actions find variously in the several societies of men, according to which they are there called virtues or vices.  And whatever authority the learned Mr. Lowde places in his Old English Dictionary, I daresay it nowhere tells him (if I should appeal to it) that the same action is not in credit, called and counted a virtue, in one place, which, being in disrepute, passes for and under the name of vice in another.  The taking notice that men bestow the names of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ according to this rule of Reputation is all I have done, or can be laid to my charge to have done, towards the making vice virtue or virtue vice.  But the good man does well, and as becomes his calling, to be watchful in such points, and to take the alarm even at expressions, which, standing alone by themselves, might sound ill and be suspected.

’Tis to this zeal, allowable in his function, that I forgive his citing as he does these words of mine (ch. xxviii. sect.  II):  “Even the exhortations of inspired teachers have not feared to appeal to common repute, Philip, iv. 8;” without taking notice of those immediately preceding, which introduce them, and run thus:  “Whereby even in the corruption of manners, the true boundaries