2.  In developing our duties to others, they were short and defective.  They embraced, indeed, the circles of kindred and friends, and inculcated patriotism, or the love of our country in the aggregate, as a primary obligation:  towards our neighbors and countrymen they taught justice, but scarcely viewed them as within the circle of benevolence.  Still less have they inculcated peace, charity, and love to our fellow-men, or embraced with benevolence the whole family of mankind.

II.  Jews. 1.  Their system was Deism; that is, the belief in one only God.  But their ideas of him and of his attributes were degrading and injurious.

2.  Their Ethics were not only imperfect, but often irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason and morality, as they respect intercourse with those around us; and repulsive and anti-social, as respecting other nations.  They needed reformation, therefore, in an eminent degree.

III.  Jesus.  In this state of things among the Jews, Jesus appeared.  His parentage was obscure; his condition poor; his education null; his natural endowments great; his life correct and innocent:  he was meek, benevolent, patient, firm, disinterested, and of the sublimest eloquence.

The disadvantages under which his doctrines appear are remarkable.

1.  Like Socrates and Epictetus, he wrote nothing himself.

2.  But he had not, like them, a Xenophon or an Arrian to write for him.  I name not Plato, who only used the name of Socrates to cover the whimsies of his own brain.  On the contrary, all the learned of his country, entrenched in its power and riches, were opposed to him, lest his labors should undermine their advantages; and the committing to writing his life and doctrines fell on unlettered and ignorant men; who wrote, too, from memory, and not till long after the transactions had passed.

3.  According to the ordinary fate of those who attempt to enlighten and reform mankind, he fell an early victim to the jealousy and combination of the altar and the throne, at about thirty-three years of age, his reason having not yet attained the maximum of its energy, nor the course of his preaching, which was but of three years at most, presented occasions for developing a complete system of morals.

4.  Hence the doctrines which he really delivered were defective as a whole, and fragments only of what he did deliver have come to us, mutilated, misstated, and often unintelligible.

5.  They have been still more disfigured by the corruptions of schismatizing followers, who have found an interest in sophisticating and perverting the simple doctrines he taught, by engrafting on them the mysticisms of a Grecian sophist, frittering them into subtleties, and obscuring them with jargon, until they have caused good men to reject the whole in disgust, and to view Jesus himself as an impostor.

Notwithstanding these disadvantages, a system of morals is presented to us, which, if filled up in the style and spirit of the rich fragments he left us, would be the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man.