A SYSTEM OF MORAL SCIENCE. BY LAURENS P. HICKOK, D. D., UNION COLLEGE. SCHENECTADY: LONDON: JOHN CHAPMAN. 1853. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, BY LAURENS P. HICKOK, In the Clerks Office of the District Court for the Northern District of New-York. Entered in London, at Stationer's Hall. RY 56635 BIGGS, PRINTER PREFACE. SCIENCE subjects all the facts it uses to a controlling law, and by this law binds all its facts into an orderly system. No elements, however abundant, can become a philosophy without their determining principle. Moral Science must conform to this condition, and moreover, must find its principle within the spiritual part of man's being. Nature, through all her successions, can reach to no absolute rule, and can bind relatively only, accor-ling to her connections as found in experience. With such consequences, it is prudent to take such a direction; for the great revolving wheel will crush those who cross its course. Her highest appeal is to self interest, and can never awaken the feeling of spiritual worthiness. But the spiritual is the supernatural; and nature must be for this, not this for nature. The moral law is above nature, not taken from nature. The virtuous man must say, I am thus and I live thus, because this only is worthy of my spiritual being'; not at all, I stand here and do this, because otherwise the ongoings of nature would torment me.' The following work has been prosecuted under the full conviction of such a two-fold demand. Only expediency, and not morality can be, if the ultimate rule of life be taken from natural consequences and not from spiritual imperatives; and with such spiritual rule, there can not even then be science, and in this a system of morals, unless all the elements used are bound up in it. But while the steady design has been to attain and keep prominent the spiritual principle, and also to combine all the parts in this principle, there has been no anxiety to exhaust all the facts which belong to the field of morals, nor is there the pretension that even all the important facts have been here |