affection among its golden rules, but rather excluding them.[A] Moreover, the answer to the question, “Who is thy neighbour?” added to the divine precept, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,” is the same as in the exploded pages of our author,—­“He to whom we can do most good.”  In determining this point, we were not to be influenced by any extrinsic or collateral considerations, by our own predilections, or the expectations of others, by our obligations to them or any services they might be able to render us, by the climate they were born in, by the house they lived in, by rank or religion, or party, or personal ties, but by the abstract merits, the pure and unbiassed justice of the case.  The artificial helps and checks to moral conduct were set aside as spurious and unnecessary, and we came at once to the grand and simple question—­“In what manner we could best contribute to the greatest possible good?” This was the paramount obligation in all cases whatever, from which we had no right to free ourselves upon any idle or formal pretext, and of which each person was to judge for himself, under the infallible authority of his own opinion and the inviolable sanction of his self-approbation.  “There was the rub that made philosophy of so short life!” Mr. Godwin’s definition of morals was the same as the admired one of law, reason without passion; but with the unlimited scope of private opinion, and in a boundless field of speculation (for nothing less would satisfy the pretensions of the New School), there was danger that the unseasoned novice might substitute some pragmatical conceit of his own for the rule of right reason, and mistake a heartless indifference for a superiority to more natural and generous feelings.  Our ardent and dauntless reformer followed out the moral of the parable of the Good Samaritan into its most rigid and repulsive consequences with a pen of steel, and let fall his “trenchant blade” on every vulnerable point of human infirmity; but there is a want in his system of the mild and persuasive tone of the Gospel, where “all is conscience and tender heart.”  Man was indeed screwed up, by mood and figure, into a logical machine, that was to forward the public good with the utmost punctuality and effect, and it might go very well on smooth ground and under favourable circumstances; but would it work up-hill or against the grain?  It was to be feared that the proud Temple of Reason, which at a distance and in stately supposition shone like the palaces of the New Jerusalem, might (when placed on actual ground) be broken up into the sordid styes of sensuality, and the petty huckster’s shops of self-interest!  Every man (it was proposed—­“so ran the tenour of the bond”) was to be a Regulus, a Codrus, a Cato, or a Brutus—­every woman a Mother of the Gracchi.