between those two opposite schemes
or systems. In the liberal or loose system,
luxury, wanton, and even disorderly mirth,
the pursuit of pleasure to some degree of
intemperance, the breach of chastity, at least
in one of the two sexes, &c. provided they
are not accompanied with gross indecency,
and do not lead to falsehood and injustice, are
generally treated with a good deal of indulgence,
and are easily either excused or pardoned
altogether. In the austere system, on
the contrary, those excesses are regarded with
the utmost abhorrence and detestation. The
vices of levity are always ruinous to the common
people, and a single week's thoughtlessness
and dissipation is often sufficient to
undo a poor workman for ever, and to drive
him, through despair, upon committing the
most enormous crimes. The wiser and better
sort of the common people, therefore,
have always the utmost abhorrence and
detestation of such excesses, which their
experience tells them are so immediately fatal to
people of their condition. The disorder and
extravagance of several years, on the contrary,
will not always ruin a man of fashion;
and people of that rank are very apt to consider
the power of indulging in some degree
of excess, as one of the advantages of their
fortune; and the liberty of doing so without
censure or reproach, as one of the privileges
which belong to their station. In people of
their own station, therefore, they regard such
excesses with but a small degree of disapprobation,
and censure them either very slightly
or not at all.
Almost all religious sects have begun
among the common people, from whom they
have generally drawn their earliest, as well
as their most numerous proselytes. The austere
system of morality has, accordingly,
been adopted by those sects almost constantly,
or with very few exceptions; for there
have been some. It was the system by which
they could best recommend themselves to that
order of people, to whom they first proposed
their plan of reformation upon what had been
before established. Many of them, perhaps
the greater part of them, have even endeavoured
to gain credit by refining upon this
austere system, and by carrying it to some
degree of folly and extravagance; and this
excessive rigour has frequently recommended
them, more than any thing else, to the respect
and veneration of the common people.
A man of rank and fortune is, by his station,
the distinguished member of a great society,
who attend to every part of his conduct,
and who thereby oblige him to attend to every
part of it himself. His authority and consideration
depend very much upon the respect
which this society bears to him. He dares
not do any thing which would disgrace or
discredit him in it; and he is obliged to a
very strict observation of that species of
morals, whether liberal or austere, which the
general consent of this society prescribes to
persons of his rank and fortune. A man of
low condition, on the contrary, is far from
being a distinguished member of any great
society. While he remains in a country village,
his conduct may be attended to, and he
may be obliged to attend to it himself. In
this situation, and in this situation only, he
may have what is called a character to lose.
But as soon as he comes into a great city, he
is sunk in obscurity and darkness. His conduct
is observed and attended to by nobody;
and he is, therefore, very likely to neglect it
himself, and to abandon himself to every sort
of low profligacy and vice. He never
emerges so effectually from this obscurity, his
conduct never excites so much the attention
of any respectable society, as by his becoming
the member of a small religious sect.
He from that moment acquires a degree of
consideration which he never had before.
All his brother sectaries are, for the credit of
the sect, interested to observe his conduct;
and, if he gives occasion to any scandal, if
he deviates very much from those austere
morals which they almost always require of
one another, to punish him by what is always
a very severe punishment, even where no evil
effects attend it, expulsion or excommunication
from the sect. In little religious sects,
accordingly, the morals of the common people
have been almost always remarkably regular
and orderly; generally much more so
than in the established church. The morals
of those little sects, indeed, have frequently
been rather disagreeably rigorous and unsocial.
There are two very easy and effectual remedies,
however, by whose joint operation
the state might, without violence, correct
whatever was unsocial or disagreeably rigorous
in the morals of all the little sects into
which the country was divided.
The first of those remedies is the study of
science and philosophy, which the state might
render almost universal among all people of
middling or more than middling rank and
fortune; not by giving salaries to teachers in
order to make them negligent and idle, but
by instituting some sort of probation, even in
the higher and more difficult sciences, to be
undergone by every person before he was permitted
to exercise any liberal profession, or
before he could be received as a candidate for
any honourable office, of trust or profit. If
the state imposed upon this order of men the
necessity of learning, it would have no occasion
to give itself any trouble about providing
them with proper teachers. They would
soon find better teachers for themselves, than
any whom the state could provide for them.
Science is the great antidote to the poison of
enthusiasm and superstition; and where all
the superior ranks of people were secured
from it, the inferior ranks could not be much
exposed to it.