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Flitwick - Charms
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Obligation, necessarily implies an obliger: The obliger must be different from, and not one and the same with the obliged: To make a man at once the obliger and the obliged, is the same thing as to make him treat or enter into a compact with himself, which is the highest of absurdities. For it is an unquestioned rule in law and reason, that whoever acquires a right to any thing from the obligation of another toward him, may relinquish that right. If therefore the obliger and obliged be one and the same person, there all obligation must be void of course; or rather, there would be no obligation begun: Yet the Stratonic atheist is guilty of this absurdity, when he talks of actions being moral or obligatory.
To these great purposes serve the THREE PRINCIPLES, while in conjunction: But now, as in the civil world and the affairs of men, our pleasure, in contemplating the wisdom and goodness of providence, is often viewed and checked by the view of some human perversity or folly which runs across that dispensation; so it is here in the intellectual. This admirable provision for the support of virtue hath been, in great measure, defeated by its pretended advocates; who, in their eternal squabbles about the true foundation of morality, and the obligation to its practice, have sacrilegiously untwisted this THREEFOLD CORD; and each running away with that part he esteemed the strongest hath affixed that to the throne of heaven, as the golden chain that is to unite and draw all unto it.
In order to judge of this point, let us suppose of a society of Atheists, one fallen into a pit, where he must inevitably perish if unassisted; and another of them happening to travel that way, who could with great ease relieve him. Will these two persons perceive nothing, but the natural essential difference between leaving a man to perish in a pit, and helping him out of it? Would not the distressed consider one of these as inhumanity to be detested, and the other as a good action deserving grateful return? Might not the traveler be too conscious, that one of these actions would be better than the other, have a goodness in it more to be approved? Yet we will supose some business or pleasure he is intent upon, stifles this consciousness and prevails with him, to leave the distressed to his miserable fate; and that he afterwards relates to the rest of society, how he had hurried from the melancholy object, in pursuit of his inclinations. Can it be imagined, that they would coldly consider this action, only as not agreeable to reason? Or would they not rather judge it to be wrong, inhuman, and worthy of detestation. It cannot, I think, be doubted, that such a society might be capable of these sentiments. And what is this but to perceive the moral difference of things, tho' they have not discovered a superior will to enforce the observance of them? Or tho' they may think the guilty secure from that punishment, which they must be conscious so great an immorality deserves. (138n)