The Hillsborough Recorder

THE MORAL

Pure and undefiled religion, is to do good; and it follows very plainly that if God be the author and friend of society, then the recognition of him must enforce all social duty, and enlightened piety must give its whole strength to the cause of public order. Few men suspect, perhaps no man comprehends, the extent of the support given by religion to every virtue. No man perhaps is aware how much our moral and social sentiments are fed from this fountain; how powerless conscience would become without the belief of a God; how palsied would be human benevolence, were not the sense of a higher benevolence to quicken and sustain it; how suddenly the whole social fabric would quake, and with what a fearful crash it would sink into hopeless ruins, were the ideas of a Superior Being, of accountability, and of a future life, to be utterly erased from every mind. And let men thoroughly believe that they are the work and sport of chance; that no superior intelligence concerns itself with human affairs; that all their improvements perish forever at death; that the weak have no guardian, and the injured no avenger; that there is no recompense for sacrifices to uprightness and the public good; that an oath is unheard in heaven; that secret crimes have no witness but the perpetrator; that human existence has no purpose, and human virtue no sustaining friend; that this brief life is every thing to us, and death is total, everlasting extinction; once let them thoroughly abandon religion, and who can conceive or describe the extent of the desolation which would follow? We hope, perhaps, that human laws and natural sympathy would hold society together. As reasonably might we believe, that were the sun quenched in the heavens, our torches would illuminate and our fires quicken and fertilize creation. What is there in human nature to awaken respect and tenderness, if man is the unprotected insect of a day? and what is he more, if atheism be true? Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man. Appetite knowing no restraint, and poverty and suffering having no solace or hope, would trample in scorn on the restraints of human laws. Virtue, duty, principle, would be mocked and spurned at as unmeaning sounds. A gorgeous self interest would supplant every other feeling; and man would become in fact, what the theory of Atheism declares him to be, a companion for brutes.