A treatise on comforting afflicted consciences - The Digital Puritan

INTRODUCTION.xviiinterest which ministers the gratification which wefeel upon having fulfilled an engagement, or uponbeing enabled to gratify the reasonable expectationswhich we had excited. It is not self-interest which fillsthe heart of the traveller with such indescribable emotionsupon the plain of Marathon or in the pass ofThermopylae. If we imagine ourselves threading thatavenue to Greece where Leonidas and his three hundredheld at bay for five days the invader of their countryand his five millions, we may form some idea of thesurprise we should experience were some advocate ofthe selfish system to disturb our emotions by the question,whether we did not think they originated in theperception, that acts of fortitude and patriotism ingeneral were connected, though remotely, with ourown well-being ?The emotion comes first : the possible connection ofthe action with our welfare comes afterwards. Itstrikes the heart as an object strikes the eye : we approveit because it is lovely, and we are so constructedas to approve it. In a similar manner the loathing andabhorrence with which we contemplate cruelty orfraud is instantaneous, and is excited by a view of theobject as it is in itself, and not by a perception of whatit may become to us. This quality of our moral emotions,their independence upon our own interest, seemsto intimate that they originate in the action of an originaland different faculty of the soul.Another argument to the same eflfect is, that ourmoral emotions are the same, whether the action,good or evil, be known only to ourselves, or disclosedto others : they are even independent of the considerationthat they are known to the Deity himself" The first and greatest punishment of guilt," says