Do you in good earnest aim at dignity of character?  I conjure you, turn away from those who live in the twilight between vice and virtue.  Are not reason, discrimination, law, and deliberate choice the distinguishing characters of humanity?  Can anything manly proceed from those who for law and light would substitute shapeless feelings, sentiments, impulses, which, as far as they differ from the vital workings in the brute animals, owe the difference to their former connection with the proper virtues of humanity?  Remember that love itself, in its highest earthly bearing, as the ground of the marriage union, becomes love by an inward fiat of the will, by a completing and sealing act of moral election, and lays claim to permanence only under the form of duty.

All things strive to ascend, and ascend in the striving.  While you labour for anything below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death.

    Unless above himself he can
    Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!

III.—­PRUDENTIAL APHORISMS

With respect to any final aim or end, the greater part of mankind live at hazard.  They have no certain harbour in view, nor direct their course by any fixed star.  But to him that knoweth not the port to which he is bound, no wind can be favourable; neither can he who has not yet determined at what mark he is to shoot, direct his arrow aright.

It is not, however, the less true that there is a proper object to aim at; and if this object be meant by the term happiness, the perfection of which consists in the exclusion of all hap [i.e., chance], I assert that there is such a thing as summum bonum, or ultimate good.  What this is, the Bible alone shows certainly, and points out the way.  “In Cicero and Plato,” says Augustine, “I meet with many things acutely said, and things that excite a certain warmth of emotion, but in none of them do I find these words, ’Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest!’”

In the works of Christian and pagan moralists, it is declared that virtue is the only happiness of this life.  You cannot become better, but you will become happier; you cannot become worse without an increase of misery.  Few men are so reprobate as not to have some lucid moments, and in such moments few can stand up unshaken against the appeal of their own experience.  What have been the wages of sin?  What has the devil done for you?

Though prudence in itself is neither virtue nor holiness, yet without prudence neither virtue nor holiness can exist.

Art thou under the tyranny of sin, a slave to vicious habits, at enmity with God, a fugitive from thy own conscience?  Oh, how idle the disputes whether the listening to the dictates of prudence from self-interested motives be virtue, when the not listening is guilt, misery, madness, and despair!  The most Christian-like pity thou canst show is to take pity on thy own soul.  The best service thou canst render is to show mercy to thyself.