any one in history whose sincerity I could less easily doubt. His narrative is one of the most deeply affecting and heart-seizing I ever saw, and he seems to me to be 'a Cobbett with a conscience.' In that additional idea, by the way, what a world of difference lies. The book would have charmed Coleridge, the fourth volume of whose literary remains I have just looked through."
Some modern philosophers would have us believe that the Conscience is a thing formed by the code of morals—by the notions of right and wrong current in the society into which we are born. That such notions deeply affect the Conscience is plain, but if they were its origin, it would rest satisfied in them, which it never can.
Nothing, for instance, is more certain than that Huntington's Conscience could not be satisfied with the code of morals, with the notions of right and wrong which obtained in the society into which he was born; that it impelled him to seek quite another code—even God's right or wrong. And yet if we glance at the condition of that society, we shall see at once how deeply its notions of right and wrong gave form and character to his conscience, its manifold evils intensifying those peculiarly dark views of God's relation to the world which his early experience and his inherited tendencies inclined him to take.
It was the end of an age. All society was in dissolution. Lust, murder, robbery, and atheism sat enthroned in Europe. "Since the reign of the Roman emperors profligacy had never been conducted in so open and undisguised a manner as under Louis XV. and the Regent Orleans. All that we read in ancient historians, veiled in the decent obscurity of a learned language, of the orgies of ancient Babylon, was equalled if not exceeded by the nocturnal revels of the Regent Orleans, the Cardinal Dubois, and his other licentious associates."[1] Paris set the fashion, London was not far behind. Not only lords, but ladies of the first families were openly dissolute in their conduct. A state of society which could produce a Duke of Queensberry must have fallen to the lowest pit of corruption. For there were few noblemen indeed who were not drunkards, gamblers, or licentious. As to the clergy, they followed the prevalent fashion, and none but a Methodist thought
- ↑ Alison.
