“I sit down as a disinterested friend to give you an
opinion, the result of what has lately passed between us. It is little likely
that anything of consequence to me should arise either way from what I am going
to state. I give up the point I have hitherto sought to enforce. You have
erected an insurmountable wall of separation between us. Henceforth we shall be
no more to each other than persons that had heard of each others’ names,
that remember there was a period when for a short time they had the habit of
seeing each other, and who may now and then have occasion to say,
‘Dear me! no, I believe he is not dead, is he?’ It might
have been otherwise. It ought to have been otherwise. But you have made your
election. I have neglected nothing that became me. I have brought the whole
subject laboriously before you; but you have remained pertinacious and
immoveable. Certainly my opinion of you is not altered; my partiality is not
diminished; if it were yet possible that you should view the question between
us with fairness and liberality, it would afford me a gratification much, much
beyond the power of words to express. It would
| AN EARNEST ARGUMENT. | 305 |
“You tell me, that if it were not for your religion,
and your ideas of a future state, you believe you should adopt a system of
conduct selfish and licentious. I do not credit you when you say this; if I
did, it would be impossible for me to have the smallest respect for you. I am
not so unfair as to suppose that your opinion has the effect of rooting out all
liberal and ingenuous sentiments from your mind, but I think it a serious
misfortune that you conceive it has. Every parent and preceptor perfectly knows
that a conduct adopted from the hope of reward or the fear of punishment is not
virtue. If I make myself useful to my fellow-men merely because I expect to be
rewarded for it, it is clear that I have no love of utility or virtue, and that
if the reward were placed on the other side, I should immediately become as
mischievous a creature as lives. Virtue is not a form of external conduct,—it
is a sentiment of the heart. I am a base and low-minded creature, whatever be
my external conduct, if I do not seek to confer happiness from a genuine
principle of sympathy, and because I have a direct and heartfelt pleasure in
the pleasure, the improvement, and advantage of others. If Omnipotence itself
were to annex eternal torments to the practice of benignity and humanity, I
know not how poor a slave I might be terrified into; but I know that I should
curse the tyrant, while I obeyed the command. In reality, the virtue of every
good man is built upon the stable basis
| 306 | WILLIAM GODWIN |
“The second error I have to notice is that your creed, as you understand it, inculcates the worst part of bigotry. You look, as in fact you tell me, with suspicion and incredulity upon the virtue of almost all that was most illustrious in ancient times, and upon half the most unprejudiced and exemplary men of our own day. This is the very quintessence of bigotry, to overturn the boundaries of virtue and vice, to try men, not by what we see of their conduct and know of their feelings, but by their adherence to, or rejection of, a speculative opinion. You have a certain Shibboleth, a God and a future state, which if any man deny, you assert he can have no firm and stable integrity. And, which is most curious, you say to him, ‘If you have only the sentiment of virtue, if you only do good from a love of rectitude and benevolence, and do not feel yourself principally led to it by a foreign, an arbitrary, and a mercenary motive, I can have no opinion of you.’ I am happy to know that these errors of yours have no necessary connection with either Deism or Christianity.
“I am happy to say that I have known many Deists and many Christians, who confess that morality is an independent rule, by a comparison with which they pronounce on the goodness of providence itself, and of which the rewards of a future state are not the source, but merely an additional sanction. Thinking thus, they are not backward or timid in applauding the virtues of the patriots and sages of ancient times, or of those benefactors of mankind in their own day, who have discarded the opinions which they cherish. . I know it has been fashionable among divines to pretend that no man rejects religion but because he wishes to be profligate with impunity, but liberal-minded believers despise the shameless assertion.
“But I have done. I entertain no hopes of a good
effect from what I now write, and merely give vent to the sentiments your
determination was calculated to excite. I have made no progress with you. When
you have dropped an objection it has been only
| A REFUSAL. | 307 |
