SECTION V. d$ afterwards want the helpof. this society : And we shall contradict our own best interest, and our felicity by our practice of rapine or falsehood, if we set the society against us. And therefore reason, perhaps, might dictate such self-denial to us in most of the common cases that would happen in human life, even if there were no God. I say therefore, where our lives or our ultimate happiness are not indanger, the good of the society, of which we ourselves are a part, and in whose welfare we expect our shareof felicity, would oblige us by reason to observe the common rules of social virtue. But in cases which relate to life and ultimate felicity, if there be no God to require of me any self-denying virtue here, nor to rewardme hereafter, the superior rule of nature and reason is to save myself, and make myself happy, though ten thousand of my fellow-creatures suffer by it. What obligation can the Welfareof thewhole society lay upon me to do any thing for them, if I must perish? If I must lose all life, and being, and happiness, for ever, by the practice of social virtue, what is there in reason or nature can oblige me to practise it ? Or who is there to reward any self-denying virtue ? The secret consolation, or the public glory of a few dying moments, that I have lost my being and my happiness in service to the public, is but a poorand irrational re- compense, if there be no God. Lef me add at last; wheresoever there are two different ob- ligations which cross each other, the strongest obligation must be obeyed, and the other ceases. Though there are eternal differ- ences between virtue and vice, and dry abstracted reason may require and seem to oblige us to the practice of virtue ; yet since reason and nature, with its piercing sensibilities, join to dictate self-preservation or self-felicitation are we not first obliged to obey these dictates ? Is not this obligation strongest ? And should not nature and reason, when joined together, break through, or rather surmountand supersede all these abstracted moral notions and differences of vice and virtue, in favour of each man's own sensible happiness ? And thenI think the least inference we can make is, that man's obligation to these social virtues, especiallyin such sort of- cases, can never be plainly proved and securedby reason, without the supposition of an existent God. But if there be a God who governs the world, whose will and authority require the practice of virtue, and who will bestow upon those who practise it, an ultimate felicity, then the practice of social virtue is securedby the strongest obligations : And thus the -moral obligation,' which ai'lses from the reason of things, and the divine or religious obligation, which arises from the will of God, Together with the natural obligation, which springs from the pursuit of our own happiness, are all united to secure the practice of every virtue.
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