accents of penitence and to assume such inflexions of voice as may in turn suit a narrative, an argumentative, a didactic, a poetic style, as the case may require. But did the church forget this difficulty? Did she tender no advice with a view to meet it? Hear her instructing her minister, "so to stand and turn himself as he may best be heard of all present;" and thus to "read distinctly with an audible voice." Precisely in the same words, and even less fully does she charge him to rehearse the service appointed for the communion," Then shall the priest, turning to the people, rehearse distinctly all the ten commandments, &c." Where the instructions are less full than before, because (I suppose) the station of the priest in the latter case was thought enough of itself to command the attention of his audience.

Now to this latter injunction we find our ministers, in the generality of cases, corresponding most faithfully. Only let them try to correspond with equal precision to the call of their church when they rehearse the lessons, as when they are rehearsing the commandments, and they may rest assured that a new spirit will be kindled in their congregations.

In some churches, sir, I have heard the second lesson followed with great effect by a short anthem, which at once throws it into relief, only that it would be better before than after. In cathedrals, the Te Deum, &c., are themselves anthems, and an attention is drawn to the lesson by a change of voice, arising from a change of the officiating minister. But in those churches which form the majority in our land few will deny but that, for want of some such arrangement, the lessons are not made to stand out and be felt as a prominent feature in the service; and it is very much to be lamented that they thereby lose their due effect, and that which their Divine origin, at least, should secure to them, even above those excellent formulæ of prayer and praise in the midst of which they are placed. I am, sir, your obedient servant,

Grosvenor-square, June 4th.

A CONSTANT SUBSCRIBER, And late Fellow of St. John's Coll., Camb.

NOTICES AND REVIEWS.

Minor Morals for Young People. By John Bowring. Whitaker and Co. 1834. 12mo.

THERE is a second volume of this publication advertised, and the first has not yet been noticed in this Magazine. It is hard to excuse this negligence in any way; for very few greater treats than this book have been seen of late days. The world has heard much of the greatest-happiness principle, but the heavy cloud of dull and dry metaphysics (or rather what assumed the name) in the Westminster Review effectually repelled almost every reader, and, in all probability, the reading public has no sort of guess what the greatest-happiness principle means. They need burst in ignorance no longer. Dr. Bowring has obligingly undertaken, in this volume, to make it plain and easy to the meanest capacities. The greatest-happiness principle being the only one in which morals can be effectually taught, he has felt it to be a duty to supply the total deficiency of all sound moral instruction for the young, and bring this heavenly principle down to their apprehension. They will be mean capacities indeed which do not at once now apprehend it. Distance and obscurity are sad enemies to that which deserves admiration. There are things to which distance and obscurity are the best friends. Reste à prouver how this is with the greatest-happiness principle.

Be it known, then, to all men, by these presents, that the rules of morality are these (p. 172)—

(1) "That is right which makes the world happier."

(2) "That is wrong which makes the world more miserable."

This, it seems, is the rule as respects others. As respects ourselves, the sage gives the rule in p. 109, when discussing whether it is right to tell a lie or not. After observing that all motives are the same in intention-i. e., that he who tells a lie, and he who abstains from it, act equally from the hope of happiness or advantage-he adds

"The determination that prompts to the virtuous action has made a wise calculation of pleasure, and the opposite determination has made a foolish calculation."

In mixed cases, where our own and other people's good may interfere, the rule is, that we are to consider whether, on the whole, the world will be happier by the act being done or not. If I lose more happiness than my neighbour will gain, I am NOT to do the act in question. But if he will gain more than I shall lose, the stern greatest-happiness principle requires me to do it.

It is hardly necessary to say that this great philosopher, propounding, as he does here, under a new name, a meagre rechauffée of the old system of expediency, leaves wholly untouched what the supporters of that system (many of whom really did understand what they were about) could make nothing of, while they kept on their own low and narrow ground. That is to say, what will make others or ourselves happier-in a given case, what is a wise calculation, he does not tell us, simply because he cannot. It will make a drunkard happier to give him spirits, and a miser will be happier by having gold; but even Dr. Bowring would not, one supposes, counsel this. Why? Because it would not, in the long run, make them happier. How do we know what will? And there we are in the old slough of Despond, from which neither Paley, nor any one else, could get out. But conceive the modesty, or the knowledge, of Dr. Bowring and his clique, in proposing this old Crambe as something new. If he does not, at least, allow that his is the wise expediency system, let him shew the real difference. Does this sect really think, when they are at all rational, that happiness is a thing of which the senses will judge, and from the present moment? Doubtless they would have a rule then, and a pretty rule it would be. This probably must, in their less lucid intervals, be their fancy, for Dr. B. tells us (p. 109) that one cannot be deceived by the greatest-happiness rule that every body can judge of happiness. (p. 253.)

But really it would be absurd to argue with such people, and they are so exquisitely and gravely comic that, notwithstanding the odious meanness and baseness of every view, wish, thought, and rule, it is impossible to be angry with them. The solemnity with which they vent the most common-place truisms as profound truths, the still greater solemnity of their wit and humour, and the perfect unconsciousness with which they propose the worst meanness, really quite disarm one. Let us look at a few of their proceedings. First, then, the oracle has maxims of prudence, as well as of virtue

(1)

"Give no advice which is injurious to yourself!"-p. 51.

(2) (A reason for preferring Botanical Collections to any others of objects in Natural Philosophy. Or, be sure to give nothing away which you like yourself.) "You cannot multiply minerals, &c., at will; you cannot communicate to others this species of your riches, without self-deprivation; but of most vegetables you can easily increase the number !"--p. 121.

(3)To violate truth is to lose reputation, and this is imprudent. The case which would justify falsehood by producing a result of good is so rare that a man must be quite sure it will warrant the sacrifice of a portion of his reputation.”— p. 98.

(4) "Do not indulge in vain regrets or useless self-reproaches."—p. 119.

SPECIMENS OF THE DIDACTIC.

"Time must be employed either in doing what is useful, or what is not; for the time that is not usefully is uselessly employed."—p. 114.

"Happiness is made up of pleasures."-p. 115.

"Nobody can be happy unless he is pleased at something; but it is not every plea sure which makes happiness."-p. 115.

"There are three ways of speaking of every action of men's lives; one in ap

proval, one in disapproval, and one which conveys no opinion as to merit or demerit.”p. 106. Φεῦ τῆς δεινοτῆτος !

(Others)" will think as we think, if the same reasons are given to them, and if those reasons influence them as they influence us."-p. 40.

That is, they will think as we think if they happen to see things in the same light! Avórng indeed!

"Be ready to do promptly what is best to be done."—p. 73.

As a maxim for action, none can clearly be more valuable than this. Of course, every philosopher of the greatest-happiness school knows at once what is best to be done.

After a long account of a street preacher (who, of course, is caricatured), and of the various opinions on him, some of which pronounced his conduct fanaticism, some hypocrisy, some superstition, some piety, we have this truly profound reflexion-

"The simple truth being only that he was preaching in the street; all the rest was the addition of despotic opinions, sitting in judgment on his conduct.”—p. 107.

An action, it seems, is an action, and not the words which describe it, whatever those words may be! Is it possible? How have we lived in ignorance of great truths, "till Bowring rose, and all was light!"

Again, p. 108—

"All motives are the same in intention. No voluntary action is done from any other than from a desire to do it,"

Prodigious!

The clearness of Dr. Bowring's ideas will be manifest at once from finding that he thinks passion, anger, and indignation, the same thing. A boy (Dialogue 1) sees a carter beat a horse cruelly, and goes and abuses him violently, and in a state of great passion. His father says-" Has your passion been of any service to you?-your anger was more violent than your reason." "But," says another boy, very justly, "must one see all sorts of wicked and improper conduct and not be angry with it? I have often heard indignation called generous, and anger virtuous. Are they never so?" "Never, my son," says the father. What a blessed instructor! Anger at wicked conduct is the same as a storm of passion, and equally unjustifiable! No doubt, what is called a virtuous indignation requires very sharp looking after, and a generous anger ought to be kept under strict control. But Dr. Bowring tells us, that the only thing is, instead of being angry at a crime, to consider how you can prevent all the mischief which it causes. Consequently if the crime is wholly over, there is no occasion to trouble yourself, and whether a mother has killed her child, or sacrificed her own life to save it-whether Dr. Bowring's chief hero, (after Mr. Bentham,) Jayme, the robber, risqued his own life to rescue his mother, or risqued hers to save his own, it is all to be heard with the same wise calmness. Or, at all events, if virtue gives you pleasure, no vice, no oppression of the weak by the strong, of childhood, old age, or woman, by the strength of manhood-no wilful deceit towards a confiding heart, -nothing, in short, however base, mean, malignant, or hateful, is to call up an emotion of disapproving anger. You may gravely and very calmly demonstrate that the man who beats his aged mother miscalculates strangely. You may even, on the notion that such conduct, on the whole, rather lessens human happiness than increases it, think it necessary that the law should prevent him from pursuing this agreeable amusement; but as to any emotion of indignation at him, if he has done so every week for the last twelvemonth, that would be quite unworthy of an utilitarian philosopher.

If Dr. Bowring should see two or three draymen beating his little son, if he has one, he must begin gravely to demonstrate to them that the boy suffers more pain from the beating than they derive pleasure from beating him,

and he must assure them that he is far from thinking that they are at all to be blamed, but that they are much to be pitied for having made a wrong calculation of pain and pleasure.

On the whole, however, while one must willingly allow that there may be some difficulty in keeping the right line, one may venture to prefer St. Paul's advice" Be ye angry, and sin not"-to the philosophical indifference of the utilitarian school.

But it would be wrong to leave this subject without giving a specimen of Dr. Bowring's excellent logic. "Anger and indignation," he says, “are never virtuous; for what is anger? It is pain-pain inflicted on yourself, by which you are excited to inflict pain on another. It may be necessary to inflict pain on another for that other's good, and for the good of society; but your being angry is just the way to prevent you from properly judging what pain, and how much pain it is right to inflict, in order to produce that good." How clear and how convincing! Anger is pain inflicted on yourself, and leading you to inflict it upon others; but your being angry (i.e., your inflicting pain on yourself and another,) is just the way to prevent your doing so properly. The way to do it quite admirably is not to do it at all. If that is not philosophy, it would be hard to say what is! There is just the same happy clearness in Dr. Bowring's other illustrations as, for example, in this"If the able sayings of bad men were collected into one volume, and the foolish sayings of good men into another, it would be hard to say which would be the largest. In the school of Pythagoras, it was enough for the disciples to exclaim ipse dixit. He says so; therefore, it must be right. But this blind submission to the opinions of others (aye, Dr. Bowring, that is the point,) has been very much shaken, and ipse-dixitism, as it is called, has become offensive to many minds." How could a more striking illustration (or proof, is it?) of the fact, that wise men say foolish things, and foolish men wise ones, be found than this-Pythagoras used to say something, and his disciples always admired it? Prodigious! By the way, into which class would Dr. Bowring's sayings go? Again, " If ever you meet with persons of such a disposition (a patronizing and domineering spirit) remember that it is an excellent evidence of a well-trained mind, to be able to bear censure with patience.” From this profound dictum, it would seem that to patronize is to cast censure.

But what is our admiration of this great school when we find that not only man but beasts are the objects of their moral care, and that this heavenly greatest-happiness principle is to be the rule for dealings with them too! Near Waterloo-bridge, it seems, may be seen in the same cage, a monkey, a cat, a mouse, a hawk, linnets, and goldfinches, living in perfect harmony. these creatures," says Dr. Bowring, "had been made moral by a judicious master; and it is very likely that, with a little trouble, we might make many a naughty little animal well-behaved and virtuous.” (p. 84.)

All

Mr. Bentham, too, the great founder of the school, allowed the mice to run up and down his legs to a drawer full of crumbs "till they got noisy and riotous, and then they were chased away on his own principle, that they annoyed him more than they benefited themselves." (p. 79.)

Morality, of course, means practice of the greatest-happiness principle; and, of course, in the first of these cases, the cat had been taught by philosophy to consider that she should gain less happiness by eating the mouse than the mouse would lose by being eaten. At the same time, there occurs this little difficulty. How is this settled, and who is the judge? If the cat should wholly disclaim all mere base sensuality, and assert that it would proceed to eat the mouse on the greatest-happiness principle, it might be difficult to produce any clear argument to the contrary. This is certain, at least, that, supposing the pain of the mouse and the pleasure of the cat to be equal at the moment, all the pleasures of memory must be thrown into the cat scale. What pleasing remembrances might she hope to indulge of the flavour "fore. gone" of mouse-venison; while the mouse could not allege, per contra, his

fears of any remembrances of the horror of being eaten. The schoolmen argued that question a long time ago; and, up to the present time, the new school has not taught us that the animal creation (at least) are not to sleep a vnyρetos vπvos. This difficulty rather increases upon consideration; for it appears that the decision of these nice questions is always in the hands of the stronger, who seem generally to decide it in their own way. Dr. Bowring, for example, intimates no disapprobation of a meat-diet. Consequently, his reasoning must be this, that a sheep loses far less happiness by being sent to Smithfield, and ruthlessly murdered by a cruel butcher, than he should if deprived of his leg of mutton. Somehow the greatest-happiness principle does not seem to stand the edible class of the animal creation in much stead. In despair of finding any solution of the difficulty, this subject is left with the remark that, if animals can be made moral, Mr. Bentham clearly neglected his duty when, instead of teaching the noisy and riotous mice more decent behaviour, he chased them away in utter carelessness as to their moral improvement, or the promotion of universal happiness. May we hope soon to see temperance societies for the reformation of the inmates of the stye, and societies" for the suppression of cruelty to birds," for the guidance of cats, foxes, and weasels?

But one must not conclude without exhibiting Dr. Bowring as a sublime writer and an humourist. His "Eulogy on Newspapers" is equally sublime in thought and language :

"What an advantage,' remarked Mr. Howard, 'we have over past generations! What a quantity of instruction is brought to us every day! What a perpetual contribution of valuable topics for reflection does a newspaper bring! Of how many countries it speaks; how many occurrences it records; how far it travels in search of information, and how far it communicates the information that it collects together! Think, how many thousands of persons have been concerned in the preparation of that great sheet; it contains volumes of knowledge, gathered together from innumerable sources. How much pleasure has been enjoyed, how much pain has been suffered, to afford materials for so much collected matter! And, like itself, every newspaper that it quotes is dependent, too, on a vast establishment, with its correspondents, editors, compositors, printers, postmen to circulate, and vehicles to convey it; and perhaps fifty such have been consulted, from all parts of the world, for the production of that we are reading. More than a hundred thousand persons, I should think, are directly or indirectly connected with the publication of a morning newspaper. Men have admired the manufacture of a watch, as a master-piece of human sagacity; but what is the manufacture of a watch to that of a newspaper? A few hands have been occupied in digging the metal, and transporting it to the melting-house, and conveying it to the workshop, and in moulding or shaping it into the exquisite forms required; but a newspaper contains the history of nations; shews the movement of the great and complicated machine of man; brings into its columns all time and all space; discusses all topics; exhibits all interests; exemplifies all vices and all virtues; and pours out floods of instruction into the minds of its readers.'" pp. 59–61.

Imagine philosophers whose Miya Oaupa is the "Morning Chronicle"its truth, charity, and decency!—who prostrate themselves before the "gentlemen of the press," and find the true height of the " sublime and beautiful" in Printing-house Square!

But now let us have the humours, not only of Dr. Bowring, but Mr. Bentham-the saturnalia, the May-day games, the frolics of these lively and frolicsome persons, recorded, too, as a moral lesson for the young. That the utilitarians' morals are a joke is true enough, but who could have dreamt that their jokes were ethical? In fact and description they are just what one might expect from the lively gentlemen of the "Westminster Review." The reader will remember that Dr. Bowring is speaking of Mr. Bentham's menage. Thus, then, does Xenophon narrate the "quips and cranks" of his Socrates:"There was a cat in the family who was a very important personage, a stately, VOL. VIII.-Sept. 1835. 2 T