The answer is obvious. It is not man's being a social creature, much less his being a moral agent, from whence alone our obligations to good-will towards him arise. There is an obligation to it prior to either of these, arising from his being a sensible creature; that is, capable of happiness or misery. Now this obligation cannot be superseded by his moral character. What justifies public execution is, not that the guilt or demerit of the criminal dispenses with the obligation of good-will; neither would this justify any severity; but that his life is inconsistent with the quiet and happiness of the world: that is, a general and more enlarged obligation necessarily destroys a particular and more confined one of the same kind, inconsistent with it. Guilt or injury then does not dispense with or supersede the duty of love and good-will.
Neither does that peculiar regard to ourselves, which was before allowed to be natural[1] to mankind, dispense with it: because that can no way innocently heighten our resentment against those who have been injurious to ourselves in particular, any otherwise than as it heightens our sense of the injury or guilt; and guilt, though in the highest degree, does not, as hath been shown, dispense with or supersede the duty of love and good-will.
If all this be true, what can a man say, who will dispute the reasonableness, or the possibility, of obeying the divine precept we are now considering? Let him speak out and it must be thus he will speak. "Mankind, i.e., a creature defective and faulty, is the proper object of good-will, whatever his faults are, when they respect others; but not when they respect me myself." That men should be affected in this manner, and act accordingly, is to be accounted for like other vices ; but to assert that it ought and must be thus, is self-partiality possessed of the very understanding.
- ↑ Serm. viii. p. 85
