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Untitled Article
" The Politician , requiring obligations to prevent the dissolution of all the bonds of society ; the Specula ^ st , desiring * to know how far he may urge his theories without danger to practice ; and the Religious , anxious to prevent helief sinking into scepticism , and devotion being * chilled into irreligion , may find much that deserves his attention in tbe conduct and motives of Socrates . For the very end of Socrates * philosophy is to fix important objects , and to develop sufficient motives to excite men to pursue them .
" Socrates investigated human nature for principles , and examined human affairs for consequences ; and ascended , by the soundest inferences of reason and the purest dictates of conscience , to a still higher obligation . He desired something which might be made a Discipline for the young , a Rule for the guiding of middle life , and a Support to the aged , And surely his Phi losopby is addressed to the feelings of the purest time of life ; yet stands tbe test to which the experience and knowledge of manhood can put it ; and
its recollections and anticipations are among the best comforts of age . It affords a system of obligation which rests on the most enlarged view of moral and physical causation . It does not indulge in the splendid error which would separate the present from the past ; yet it proposes to make the present better than the past , and the future than the present time . And , lastly , it affords one of the most perfect comments which reason and conscience have ever supplied on the truth and importance of the moral lessons we have derived from the Christian Religion /'—Pref . v—vii .
After a beautiful sketch of Socrates , as a Speculatist and a practical Moralist , the work consists of an exposition of the three great objects to which his agency was directed ; viz . to rouse and elevate the minds of the people to such a reverence for the Deity as may become an influential motive to conduct : to make his expression of this reverence as consistent as truth would permit with the established belief and worship of his
country : and the removal from his country ' s belief and worship of whatever principles appeared irreconcileable to reason and prejudicial to happiness . Under these three heads are comprehended an inquiry into the rectkude of Socrates * principle of resting conduct on Divine Obligation ; an inquiry into the nature , design , and result of his compliance with the religion of his country ; and a consideration of the duty and the best methods of removing practical falsehoods from that religion as generally professed .
We will not injure an argument so closely knit by separating its parts for the extraction of any ; nor will we anticipate the effect of the whole on the reader by commenting on its separate portions , from some of which we should have to express our dissent , and expose what we deem their sophistry . We give only a few paragraphs which will bear disconnexion , and chiefly for the purpose of attracting our enlightened readers to a study of the work :
" Antiquity has adjudged to Socrates the palm for goodness and for wisdom ; for the goodness which labours to promote the well-being , and for the wisdom which discerns what constitutes the well-being of man . I "
Untitled Article
582 The Religion ofSoerales
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1831, page 582, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2601/page/6/
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